A safety criterion for reusing a business process in the desired integrated process

Enterprises are witnessing increased thrust on collaboration and integration of existing applications to provide value-added services across the entire supply chain. Traditionally, enterprise applications are built as point solutions with context-specific built-in assumptions hard-coded in their implementation. Enterprise Application Integration discipline deals with the mechanism for integrating such isolated applications into a consistent whole. By modeling an enterprise application as a 3-tuple comprising of its data, service and process models, EAI problem can be visualized as view-integration problem over data, service and process models. This paper presents a pragmatic approach to analyze the process model of an existing application with respect the process model of desired application to identify and mitigate the conflicts in the built-in assumptions of two process models. A formal technique to analyze the process model at various levels of granularities and a set of operators to mitigate the conflicts are proposed. The proposed approach maximizes the reusability in the context of EAI.