Minimising Lifecycle Transitions in Service-Oriented Business Processes

Service selection involves the use of well-defined criteria such as Quality of Service (QoS) metrics to optimally select services for business processes. However in some cases, the service capabilities being accessed require non-trivial protocols for accessing them. When the protocol of a selected service is incompatible with the process, a lifecycle transition is triggered from operation and evaluation phase to the design phase of the process lifecycle. Such transitions can be expensive in terms of the technical and organisational resources required. In this paper, we introduce a conceptual framework for minimising such transitions in the process lifecycle by considering the relative protocol compatitbility between candidate services.