Patterns of business rules to enable agile business processes

A problem of today's standard business process (BP) automation systems is that they are too rigid to cope with changing business demands, especially for long running BPs. A solution to overcome this problem is to combine BPs with business rules (BRs). State-of-the-art BP automation systems use WS composition languages and BR services. Often these BRs are used to make calculations and to adapt simple decisions to business users without full integration into a BP automation system. The authors show that BP execution and BR functionality can be integrated properly in a standard service-oriented architecture. This finding is applied in a new approach of configuring BPs through using BRs. The assumption is that if one considers BRs already while modelling a BP, more advanced BP aspects like decisions, data constraints and control flow can be made agile and adaptive during run-time. BP modelling patterns are presented that demonstrate how BRs can be used to obtain different aspects of BP agility. Furthermore, different implementational aspects of bringing BPs and BRs together are discussed and it is shown how to implement these patterns using the IBM WebSphere® integration developer and the IBM WebSphere® process server.