Quality-Oriented Execution of Cooperative Processes

Revision with unchanged content. Cooperative business processes supporting the collaboration of companies are of increasing importance as they help to reduce the complexity of co­operation scenarios and optimize time and costs. Ensuring that such pro­cesses reliably serve their purpose and meet the users' expectations implies achieving a high execution quality of the processes. In this book we propose an architecture that provides a new approach and generic infra­structure to support quality-oriented execution and optimization of co­operative processes. We provide a classification of quality characteristics describing the execution quality of processes. The quality characteristics can be monitored automatically and violations can be detected. A rule-based approach handles constraint violations and other exceptional events. This complements any exception handling that is provided by process engines executing the cooperative processes and provides a generic solution for quality support. Furthermore, recommendations for the optimization of co­operative processes may be derived based on the analysis of log entries. The book is targeted at scientists, researchers and practitioners in the area of business process management.