LBD Builder: A Tool for Design and Composition of Business Processes

Complexity of the business world demands new approaches towards its abstraction services. Over the last few years, the business applications have become more and more complex and new infrastructure and features requirements have proven necessary. Logistic companies have already started implementing of such applications and their adjustment to the needs of clients.

Another example delivers an online merchant whose delivery process is significantly different from that of normal applications. A customer who purchases goods from an online merchant requires a logistic center to perform his order from a warehouse and have his products delivered to his residential place. A transport company can do this. For this purpose the delivery services must correspond exactly to the services offered by the online merchants. Additionally, the services complexities should be transparent to any third party – the customer. Typical tasks the customers expect from suppliers are: tracking, invoicing and observing of the offered services, whereas a customer has a chance to verify an order and its time delivery.

The initial situation consists of a theoretical basis concerning a graphical representation of business process – Labeled Behavior Diagrams (shortly LBD). The LBD are represented by Petri networks based on description language for business process specification. Main difference between the Petri networks and the LBD is the introduction of labels. The labels can be seen as documents used by the different activities. As the combined process can grow on complexity the service provider has the possibility to select some activities and declare them for invocable. Invocable are these activities that are important to the user. The user can create synchronization between the different business processes with the help of a synchronization service. The synchronization service is a LBD as well. An algorithm for the creation of the abstracted common process has been introduced by Schrefl and Preuner in the paper “'LBD Builder': A tool for design and composition of business processes” .

Theobjectives of this thesiswere:
1. to create a tool that implements the algorithm for composition and abstraction of business services;
2. to create a language description for LBD based on XML language;
3.to map existing description languages, like BPEL4WS to LBD and to compare the existing description languages for web services.
Additionally it was created a MS Visio based tool for drawing of LBDs.