Patterns of Process Integration

Workflow/Business processes typically rely on state-of-the-art integration platforms to enable interactions with remote applications, Web services, and partner processes. State-of-the-art integration platforms posess many conceptual and technical problems, and hence Workflow/Business processes hence have inherited them - when it comes to integration.

This project seeks to find ways to better support inter-process communication through satisfying the following goals:

1. To investigate and resolve some of the core conceptual problems of integration in general.
2. To propose a comprehensive set of process integration patterns that highlight what is required for business processes to inter-connect.
3. To produce prototypes of new technologies, that resolve the core conceptual problems of integration.
4. To link the new technologies of [3] with the well known business process platform YAWL.

Progress on Goal #1 so far has gone extremely well. Late 2005 a paper on the notion of coupling in middleware was presented in the internatonal conference on Distributed Objects and Applications - Cyprus. The paper was nominated with honorable mention for the 2005 Manfred Paul Award (2nd out of 360 conference submissions & 268 workshop submissions).