Alert-driven Process Integration in a Web Services Environment

Process management technology has recently been employed not only within businesses but also as a framework for implementing web-services over the Internet. Such web-services typically require collaborative enactment of processes across multiple organizations. It is essential in the current highly competitive and dynamic business environment that urgent requests and critical messages are delivered and handled timely. These urgent requests and critical messages are referred to as alerts. Presently, most web-services cannot address urgency, and alerts are often handled in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated alert management system for effective process integration under urgent constraints. We develop a model for specifying alerts, in which alerts are associated-with business tasks and a set of parameters are captured for their routing. The alert monitor matches service provider(s) to receive an alert, based on the alert specification. We then propose a routing mechanism that is initiated when the alert message is not acknowledged or serviced within the deadline, so that the alert can be forwarded to other service providers if necessary. Service monitoring is especially essential when humans are involved in the processes, such as, approvals, decisions, and expert consultations. We outline our implementation framework with Web Services and demonstrate our approach with an example healthcare process integration environment.