Harmonized Messaging - A New Foundation for Automated Process Communication

ARC Linkage Grant 2003 - 2006

Process communication, especially in web environments is characterized by complex interactions between heterogeneous and autonomous systems within the enterprise and often between trading partners. An overwhelming number of initiatives and proposals are underway to provide solutions for process specification and communication. However, the focus is often on defining APIs rather than the semantics of the underlying message exchange. We see a great potential in changing the current messaging infrastructure to suit its new role in facilitating complex, long running interactions for collaborative processes operating in a decentralized environment. This envisaged next generation of messaging technology will extend its ability to support dynamic business processes in a web-centric environment. Providing a level of harmonization to multiple messages to form a single custom definable backbone of a newly formed message stream, creates a highly challenging new research direction. There is a strong potential that the project outcomes will present a new way of overcoming well understood difficulties in dealing with multiple communicating processes owned by different partners and executing on disparate systems.

Chief Investigators (ITEE/UQ)

Prof Maria Orlowska
Dr. Shazia Sadiq

Partner Investigators (SAP Research Centre Brisbane)

Dr. Wasim Sadiq
Dr. Karsten Schulz

Associated Staff

Zoran Milosevic
Tony O'Hagan
William Waterson
Margarit Kirov (2005)
Peter Becker (2004)

Associated Students

Datma Cao (APAI)
The HMT project would try to facilitate the communication between the human agents, component applications, services as well as the automated business processes in order to provide an innovative way of integrating business processes. This thesis focuses on the development of a formal coordination rules specification language. The rules must at least provide the ability to coordinate messages based on their appearances, ability to coordinate messages within a temporal constraint environment, ability to link messages by their contents, and the ability to group messages. In addition, this thesis will present a comprehensive comparison the language with existing rules-based languages, as well as formal tools for specification, verification, and evaluation of the expressions in the language.

Belinda Carter (APA)
The project will address the issue of verification of rule-based business processes, where each process is described through a set of rules describing the exchange of XML messages in a temporal context. Possible structural errors will be documented and methods devised in order to identify the verification issues based on a graphical representation of a set of inter-related rules, via matrix operations and/or graph reduction techniques. Depending on complexity of problems solved, a prototype may be developed to demonstrate research outcomes during final stages of the project.

Related Publications

Zoran Milosevic, Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska (2006), Translating business contract into compliant business processes, Proc. The 10th IEEE Conference on Enterprise Distributed Object Computing, Hong Kong, 16-20 Oct 2006.

Guido Governatori, Zoran Milosevic, Shazia Sadiq (2006), Compliance checking between business processes and business contracts, Proc. The 10th IEEE Conference on Enterprise Distributed Object Computing, Hong Kong, 16-20 Oct 2006.

Ruopeng Lu, Shazia Sadiq (2006) Managing Process Variants as an Information Resource. 4th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM2006), Vienna, Austria, 2006

Zoran Milosevic, Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska (2006) On Deriving Process Models from Business Contracts. 4th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM2006), Vienna, Austria, 2006

Wasim Sadiq., Shazia Sadiq, Karsten Schulz (2006) Model Driven Distribution of Collaborative Business Processes. IEEE International Conference on Services Computing. SCC 2006, Chicago, USA. Sep 2006.

Zoran Milosevic, Maria Orlowska, Shazia Sadiq (2006) Linking contracts, processes and services: an event-driven approach. IEEE International Conference on Services Computing. SCC 2006, Chicago, USA. Sep 2006.

Shazia Sadiq, Manfred Reichert, Karsten Schulz, Editors (2006) Proceedings of International Workshop on Technologies for Collaborative Business Process Management. TCoB2006, Paphos, Cyprus. May 2006.

Ruopeng Lu, Shazia Sadiq, Guido Governatori (2006) Utilizing Successful Work Practice for Business Process Evolution. 9th International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS2006), Klagenfurt, Austria, May 31 -June 22, 2006

Dat Cao Ma, Belinda Carter, Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska (2006) Enterprise Integration Architecture for Harmonized Messaging. Handbook of Enterprise Systems Architecture in Practice.

Dat C. Ma, Maria E. Orlowska, Shazia W. Sadiq. (2006) Formal Considerations of Rule-Based Messaging for Business Process Integration, Special Issue of Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, Vol 37/2 (Feb/March 2006).

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Joe Lin, Wasim Sadiq. (2006) Quality of Service in Flexible Workflows. Enterprise Information Systems VII. Springer-Verlag 2006.

Vineet Padmanabhan, Guido Governatori, Shazia Sadiq, Robert Colomb and Antonino Rotolo. (2006) Process Modelling: The Deontic Way. In Markus Stumptner, Sven Hartmann and Yasushi Kiyoki, editors, Australia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling 2006, number 53 in Conference Research and Practice of Information Technology. Australian Computer Science Association, ACS.

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Wasim Sadiq, Karsten Schulz. (2005) When workflows will not deliver: The case of contradicting work practice. International Conference on Business Information Systems BIS2005. April 20 – 22 2005. Poznan, Poland.

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Wasim Sadiq. (2005) Role of Messaging in Collaborative Business Processes. IRMA International Conference (Business Process Management Track). San Diego, California, USA. May 15-18 2005.

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Joe Lin, Wasim Sadiq. (2005) Quality of Service in Flexible Workflows through Process Constraints. The 7th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems. Miami, USA. 24-28 May 2005.

Shazia Sadiq, Wasim Sadiq, Maria Orlowska (2005) A Framework for Constraint Specification and Validation in Flexible Workflows. Information Systems Volume 30, Issue 5, July 2005.

Maria Orlowska, Shazia Sadiq (2005) Editor - Special Issue on Collaborative Business Process Technologies. Data and Knowledge. Engineering. Elsevier Science. Volume 52 (2005) 1 -3.

Maria Orlowska, Shazia Sadiq (2005) Introduction to Collaborative Business Process Technologies. Data and Knowledge Engineering. Elsevier Science. Volume 52 (2005) 1 -3.

DatCao Ma, M. E. Orlowska, and S. W. Sadiq, "Introduction to a Calculus of Rule-Based Messaging for Business Process Integration." Brisbane: The University of Queensland, 2005, No. 36.

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Wasim Sadiq, Karsten Schulz. (2004) Collaborative Business Process Management through Harmonized Messaging. Journal of Information and Organizational Sciences. Vol 28. No 1-2. 2004.

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Wasim Sadiq, Karsten Schulz (2004) Facilitating Business Process Management with Harmonized Messaging. 6th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2004). Universidade Portucalense, Porto – Portugal. 14-17, April 2004.

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Wasim Sadiq, Cameron Foulger (2004) Data Flow and Validation in Workflow Modeling. The Fifteenth Australasian Database Conference Dunedin, New Zealand, January 18 -- 22, 2004.

for a copy of recent papers, please contact shazia@itee.uq.edu.au