A Constraint-Driven Business Object Model for Service-Based Business Processes

Abstract

Business today is increasingly becoming service-driven. A service represents either a part of or a complete business process, which in turn depicts the life cycle of a Business Object (BO). A number of actions constrained by a set of business policies cause the BO to transit from an initial state to a final state during its life cycle. The constraints would vary for different customized business processes. To engineer reliable service based systems it is crucial to verify the reachability of the desired final states of the BO model against a given set of constraints. We propose the formal specification of a constraint-driven BO model, and thereby, present a verification tool to validate the life cycle of the BO model given a set of constraints. The core object and its constraint-driven life cycle are modeled separately for flexibility and customizability. We also define a language specification to represent our BO model and the business goals. The specification is automatically interpreted by our verification tool, which outputs a graphical view of the life cycle and a textual report of the validation results.