Incorporating Business Policies into Business Protocols

Abstract

A business process streamlines how different business parties interact with one another, in order to achieve a business goal. The modeling and enactment of business process is notoriously complex, especially in open systems where the participants are autonomous and heterogeneous. Conceptually, a business process consists of two important elements; the business protocols that specify the interactions between the partners and the business policies that drive the partners? behavior during the enactment of protocols. Business policies are an integral and important component of business processes. Business policies are often expressed and implemented as business rules. It is common to embed these business rules within the business process implementation. When the business practices or policies change, as they often do, it is difficult to dynamically manage these changes without affecting the business process implementation. It is a challenge to correctly reflect the policy changes with minimal or no change to the implementation of the business process. The conventional workflow approaches of representing business policies, reduce the flexibility and reusability of business processes. It is possible to control the behavior of protocol participants dynamically, without changing the protocol specification by representing the private internal business policies separate from the generic, public business protocols. However, given a separate policy and protocol specification, it is important that when the participants enact the protocol, the behavior dictated by their local policies be congruent with the protocol specifications. The focus of this thesis is to develop a methodology to configure the private policies of the participant such that, its behavior during protocol enactment is always compliant with the protocol. We propose a methodology that describes how the agent policies should be added to the protocol specification such that the protocol is not violated during enactment.