A Goal-Based Business Service Selection Approach

As business process optimization and innovation are the only means to survive in such a dynamic business world, organizations are now combining BPM technologies with service-orientation so as to achieve them. Business processes are now considered as business services (BSs) that span the organizational boundaries and have to satisfy cross-organizational objectives. The most promising research approaches on BS design are not only considering what the BS does and how but also the business requirements that it must satisfy. They are also able to perform BS composition. However, they mainly concentrate on the functional aspect. Even if few of them do consider the non-functional aspect, they cannot select the best BS combination alternative in a precise and objective way. To this end, this paper proposes a goal-oriented approach that is able to discover the best possible way a BS can be composed from other BSs according to both functional and non-functional requirements. This approach advances the state-of-the-art in service composition and selection as it is able to propose semantically robust BS combinations even if there is a missing functionality in terms of partially fulfilled or unfulfilled required goals and considers novel optimization criteria such as the number of BSs constituting the proposed solution and the percentage of BSs reused.