Process Lines for Automatic Workflow Development

In some business environments, processes of different organizations are very similar to each other. This produces families of processes with common characteristics but also portions that vary according to the specific organization. Two emerging approaches can be adopted and combined to easily model, implement and update families of business processes: Software Product Line (SPL) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Our work suggests a framework to transfer the main peculiarities of the SPL to the SOA system development, in order to realize a SOA system line. Starting from the SPL concept, we introduce process lines, i.e., families of process models suitable for different customers or market segments. Moreover, we present an approach for the automatic generation of a SOA system starting from a process model. The combination of these approaches, can be used to easily develop a family of SOA systems each one appropriate for different context characteristics. In this work, an application of the proposed approach in a real project is also proposed. Copyright © 2013 SCITEPRESS.