A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for Business Process Based SaaS Services Composition

Nowadays, tremendous number of enterprises are looking to outsource their business processes in order to gain in productivity, reduce cost, and enhance performance. Outsourcing business processes to cloud computing and more specifically to SaaS services, is actually among the most prominent opportunities regarding the benefits that this paradigm offers. However, matching the business process activities with the suitable SaaS services is not a trivial task regarding the diversity of both, functional requirements of business processes and the functionalities offered by SaaS services. Furthermore, once the business process execution is entirely supported by the SaaS services, the process owner, lacking in general the required expertise related to SaaS domain, needs to be aware of how the business process is handled by the SaaS. This is done principally through transforming the business process model to the SaaS model. This paper proposes a model-based approach using SAT-based formal verification to select and validate the most suitable SaaS services to support the business process achievement. Furthermore, a model to model transformation from business process to SaaS is proposed. This transformation is based on (i) a lightweight extension of the business process meta-model of ISO/CEI 19510 and (ii) our proposition of the SaaS meta-model.