Abstract:

Business Process (BP) development can be defined as the process of constructing a workflow application by composing a set of services performing BP’s activities. In this respect, Cloud Services (CSs) are being increasingly used in BP development to ensure a high level of performance with a low operating cost. Although large companies may benefit from CSs’ advantages, SMEs and startups are falling behind in cloud usage due to missing Information Technology competence, (IT-competence). The crucial challenge facing SMEs and startups in cloud-based BP development is to effectively address the so-called business and IT alignment issue. It presents the alignment between two different domains; one that entails technical cloud resources requirements and another comprising business-level. Formerly, we present this issue as a discovery challenge of suitable CSs performing abstract BP’s activities. To address this challenge, firstly, we introduce the concept of cloud-aware BP by proposing a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) named ”BP4Cloud” to enrich BP modeling and cover both business and technical requirements. Secondly, we ropose an Activity-Services Matching algorithm that automates the discovery of CSs performing BP’s activities. As a part of the evaluation, we set up by clarifying the specification of BP4Cloud elements through a proof of concept implementation applied on a real BP. Then, we proceed by evaluating the precision and recall of our Activity-Service Matching algorithm.