Business Process Adaptations via Protocols

Business process management in service-oriented computing (SOC) environments poses special challenges. In particular, SOC environments are dynamic, thereby requiring frequent changes in business processes. Current business process modeling approaches handle such changes in an ad hoc manner, and lack a principled means of determining what needs to be changed and where. This paper addresses process adaptability through a novel application of business protocols, especially of protocol composition, introduced in our previous work. Through a real business scenario of auto-insurance claim processing, this paper demonstrates how a wide range of adaptations can be handled naturally and systematically via protocol composition. The illustrated adaptations have been evaluated via a prototype.