Managing configurable business process as a service to satisfy client transactional requirements

Abstract

Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) has emerged in recent years as a new paradigm for hosting and offering complex business operations using a cloud service delivery model. BPaaS providers can increase the diversity of their market by enabling their services to be configured to meet individual client needs. However, in order for the clients to trust external services for sensitive business processes, they must be assured that the transactional integrity of the service complies with their own business policies. To provide this trust, we propose a BPaaS configuration method that allows clients to ensure their transactional requirements will not be violated, while configuring the activities, resources, and data objects used in the service. Clients formalize transactional requirements using an expressive and easy-to-use template set. The service is then configured and verified in a three-step process that applies binary decision diagram analysis and model checking. An experimental study using a configurable Web store checkout BPaaS demonstrates the feasibility of our approach. Our state space reduction methods allow verification of models with hundreds of configurable features and requirements.