Graph-based pattern matching and discovery for process-centric service architecture design and integratión

Abstract

Process automation and applications integration initiatives are oftencomplex and involve significant resources in large organisations. The increasing adoption of service-based architectures to solve integration problems and the widely accepted practice of utilising patterns as a medium to reuse design knowledgemotivated the definition of this work. In this work a pattern-based framework and techniques providing automation and structure to address the process and applicationintegration problem are proposed. The framework is a layered architectureproviding modelling and traceability support to different abstraction layers of theintegration problem. To define new services - building blocks of the integration solution - the framework includes techniques to identify process patterns in concreteprocess models. Graphs and graph morphisms provide a formal basis to represent patterns and their relation to models. A family of graph-based algorithms support automation during matching and discovery of patterns in layered process service models. The framework and techniques are demonstrated in a case study. Thealgorithms implementing the pattern matching and discovery techniques are investigated through a set of experiments from an empirical evaluation. Observationsfrom conducted interviews to practitioners provide suggestions to enhance the proposed techniques and direct future work regarding analysis tasks in process integration initiatives.