Incorporating Events into Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Because Web-scale processes are inherently cross-organizational, they require the robust enactment of interactions among autonomous parties. However, specifying the processes involved is difficult. To overcome this obstacle, the authors use a business protocol that lets the applicable events and responses vary based on where the process is deployed and the infrastructure and IT applications installed therein. Treating events and business logic as separate concerns also yields clearer models and improves reusability. The authors describe the architecture and tools and outline a methodology by which each participant in a process can define, detect, and respond to events.