MABUP: multi level autonomic business process

Abstract

Business processes are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous in consequence of new stakeholders demands and technological advances. This calls for business processes that must be managed and executed in an autonomic manner in response to changes in its environmental context. Business Processes that are able to be self-managed are referred to as Autonomic Business Processes. A key challenge is to provide operational environment variability, understandability and scalability in modeling increasingly complex business processes. We achieve such goals by explicitly expressing environment variability through context-awareness, quality attributes which properly represent system parameters and the modularity through the use of multi-level approach for Autonomic Business Process. This novel approach, named Multi Level Autonomic Business Process - MABUP, provides four welldefined levels of abstraction to model business and operational knowledge namely, Organizational Level, Technological Level, Operational Level and Service Level; furthermore, an architecture to guide the autonomic management activity. Real examples were used to illustrate and evaluate our proposal through a simulation and controlled experiment. Results show that Multi Level Autonomic Business Process improves understandability and expressivity of autonomic features, modularization of Autonomic Business Process models and facility in business modeling. Furthermore, when used, can reduce time, cost and workload in its management.