Support for Business Process Flexibility in Service Compositions: An Evaluative Survey

Service compositions provide a promising way to realize and coordinate automated support for business activities and processes. These business processes and their automated support need to survive in highly volatile market and technical environments. Consequently, many approaches have been proposed to address the issue of flexibility support in business process modeling and enactment. However, it remains a challenge for researchers and practitioners. In this paper we provide a systematic analysis of the requirements for process flexibility in the context of service compositions, and analyze the existing approaches against these set of requirements. Based on this analysis, we draw some general observations and point to some critical issues for future investigation into business process flexibility support in service composition.