Section: Research Program

Process Orchestration and Management

Process Orchestration and Management is considered as a core discipline behind Service Management and Computing. It includes the analysis, the modelling, the execution, the monitoring and the continuous improvement of enterprise processes and is for us a central domain of studies. Many efforts have been devoted to establish standard business process models founded on well-grounded theories (e.g. Petri Nets) that meet the needs of business analysts, software engineers and software integrators. This has led to heated debate in the BPM community as the two points of view are very difficult to reconcile. On one side, the business people in general require models that are easy to use and understand and that can be quickly adapted to exceptional situations. On the other side, IT people need models with an operational semantic in order to be able transform them into executable artefacts. Part of our work has been an attempt to reconcile these points of view. It resulted in the development of the Bonita Business process management system. It resulted also more recently on our work in crisis management where the same people are designing, executing and monitoring the process as it executes. More generally, and at a larger scale, we have been considering the problem of processes spanning the barriers of organisations. It leads to the more general problem of service composition as a way to coordinate inter organisational construction of applications. These applications provide value, based on the composition of lower level services  [20].