High-Quality Business Processes Based on Multi-Dimensional QoS

Introduction

When a business analyst designs a new business process or performs refactoring of an existing process, determining the dependability and reliability of the final end-to-end composition of operations and services that make up the process is of paramount importance; without considering aspects of the business process such as the maximum throughput, time required to complete the process or its availability, the process might not meet the expectations of the business or their customers. Therefore, an abstract business process, which we consider to be a collection of interrelated, structured activities or tasks, must be designed not only with coherent and functionally compatible services but also with a set of qualities of service (QoS) that will fulfill the necessary business objectives.

This chapter focuses on the dependability of business processes by considering how an abstract business processes is deployed with a selection of services from the Internet of Services that meets the desired end-to-end quality of service (Cardoso et al, 2009) from the process’ system-level perspective (Liang et al, 2008) (Liang et al, 2009). The challenge with operating a business process with end-to-end quality of service like this is that no methodology exists for determining resource allocation from the many autonomous service providers available through the Internet of Services.

This chapter demonstrates how an approach based on a multi-criteria analysis can be used to decide on the combination of services to select. Later, we describe how we implemented this decision making technique using two optimization techniques (simulated annealing and genetic algorithms) and carry out an experimental evaluation of the performance of each technique. However, we first present an overview of the context and issues involved and describe the proposed high-level approach before introducing the decision making techniques.