Existing and future standards for event-driven business process management

Abstract

The development and operation of modern IT infrastructures requires generally accepted standards. Many standardization efforts are currently ongoing within the service oriented and event processing community. Recently a new discipline entitled "Event-Driven Business Process Management (ED-BPM)"has emerged which takes a synergetic approach within this larger area. Consecutively, topics being discussed in this paper relate to the role of standards in the ED-BPM context, the need for a standard per se and the benefits and shortcomings of standardization in early phases vs. late phases. Within this activities, the most interesting proposal for a reference architecture is the Networked European Software and Services Initiative (NESSI) approach called NESSI Open Serivce Framework - Reference Architecture (NEXOF-RA) which has to be enhanced in order to support ED-BPM applications. Thereupon a proposal for describing the context and structure of occurring events on a descriptive and non-complex level of events is discussed. Related industry standards like "Notification Event Architecture for Retail (NEAR)"and the possibility to extend that approach to other domains are surveyed. Two possible extensions are exemplified, for the logistics domain (NEAL), and for the finance domain (NEAF). Use cases for the retail, logistics, and finance domains are demonstrated. In the final analysis conclusions are drawn and proposed action items for advancing the ED-BPM standardization are made. The following paper is a shortened version. The whole paper can be downloaded on the CITT-homepage http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/Existing_and_Future_Standards_for_EDB_PM.pdf