Abstract:

A business process consists of a set of activities which are performed in a coordinated way to achieve an objective. Sometimes, the adequate combination of these activities cannot always be modelled using a classical business process at design time, since the activities have to achieve an agreement concerning of their data input. The proposed scenario is: when the input of one activity depends on the input of the rest of the activities and these input have domains. Then the problem becomes which set of values of the input parameters should be chosen in the range that optimizes the overall behaviour of the activities that work together. In this paper, a methodology to model optimization agreements in business processes when these activities are also based on Web Services is proposed. In order to reach this type of agreement, an adaptation of a constraint satisfaction problem algorithm is developed. Thanks to this adaptation, the best input combination of variables that optimizes the overall objective is found.