Managing Evolving Business Workflows through the Capture of Descriptive Information

TL;DR

This paper presents CRISTAL, a description-driven system enabling flexible, reconfigurable enterprise application integration, demonstrated through manufacturing systems, and compares it with other model-driven approaches.

Contribution

It introduces CRISTAL, a novel description-driven system for dynamic business process management and integration, with practical application in manufacturing and comparison to existing model-driven methods.

Findings

CRISTAL supports highly reconfigurable workflows.

The Agilium system demonstrates practical application in manufacturing.

Comparison shows advantages over traditional model-driven approaches.

Abstract

Business systems these days need to be agile to address the needs of a changing world. In particular the discipline of Enterprise Application Integration requires business process management to be highly reconfigurable with the ability to support dynamic workflows, inter-application integration and process reconfiguration. Basing EAI systems on model-resident or on a so-called description-driven approach enables aspects of flexibility, distribution, system evolution and integration to be addressed in a domain-independent manner. Such a system called CRISTAL is described in this paper with particular emphasis on its application to EAI problem domains. A practical example of the CRISTAL technology in the domain of manufacturing systems, called Agilium, is described to demonstrate the principles of model-driven system evolution and integration. The approach is compared to other model-driven development approaches such as the Model-Driven Architecture of the OMG and so-called Adaptive Object Models.