Service Pattern: An Integrated Business Process Model for Modern Service Industry

Modern service industry (MSI) is becoming a leading and pillar industry in recent years. Its theory construction, however, has not kept up with the industry development. Specifically, the business process designing and reconstructing, the critical part in business transformation and competition of modern service enterprise, are still handled manually. The existing models, e.g., BPMN and EPC, mainly adopt the business activities and events without considering the resource and data generated and consumed in interaction with business collaborators, which is ubiquitous in MSI business process. Hence, the deficiency of resource and data in these models hindered them from popularization in MSI. In this paper, with a systematic analysis of the above issues, we introduce the service pattern of MSI business process from the point view of resource and data with formalized description and some concrete basic patterns. To support the process designing and reconstructing better, we propose a pattern-centered formalization language, called Service Pattern Description Language (SPDL). Furthermore, a service pattern matching approach, in the Constructing-As-Identifying style, is studied and a service process designing tool, called SPDL-Editor, is developed. Additionally, a case of the famous video-on-demand service (Youku) in China is given, though out of this paper, for a better understanding of our theories.