Service orientation: Gaining process flexibility by means of (web) services and in particular mobile and context-aware services

Today’s enterprises need to cope with a high demands of flexibility, caused by a growing environmental dynamic and uncertainty as well as changing customer demands. This goes hand in hand with the requirement of a flexible implementation and execution of business processes, which applies for in-house processes and in particular for intercompany processes. IT systems often enable the realization of processes in companies partly or even as a whole, and are in many cases bottlenecks concerning flexibility. Hence, an efficient and flexible adaption of IT systems to new or changing processes is required, which can be realized by means of concepts and technologies of service-oriented systems (e.g., service-oriented architectures, web services, cloud services or mobile services). In order to gain flexibility, the use and implementation of services needs to be managed sufficiently. For service supported processes, this involves, for instance, the selection of the optimal service composition considering non-functional properties (e.g., price, response time, etc.), or determining an optimal service granularity. Here, the substitution of services already planned for invocation in general, and in particular due to unexpected events such as a service failure, leads to a necessary re-planning. The following research questions are central:

•  How can service granularity be determined with the help of a model-driven approach, such that new or changing processes can be realized in a flexible way by services?
• What kind of methods (e.g., numeric methods such as simulation experiments) can be applied in order to determine the effects of potential service failures in a systematic and well-founded way?
• How to specify a service selection approach that is capable of considering the effects of potential service failures already at planning time (i.e., before starting the process execution)?

Furthermore, to increase the flexibility of processes, the design and use of innovative, mobile technologies (e.g., smartphones and tablets) and services – also in combination with mobile applications - is becoming more and more important. Context information that can be captured via a mobile device can serve as a starting point to adapt processes or to select services. Here, major issues are that context information (e.g., GPS data) changes dynamically or is uncertain during the process execution. Such issues lead to many challenges (e.g., interdependencies between services) that need to be taken into account, when context information is used for the selection of services.
Moreover, automated process planning in combination with the selection of (mobile and ubiquitous) services opens up the possibility to develop smart mobile applications. Here, the goal is to facilitate mobile applications with a smart and intelligent processing logic, rather than just focus on visualising information, which is common nowadays. With the use of context and further available information (e.g., company databases, open data, etc.), the mobile applications should be capable of initiating, preparing, supporting or fully executing actions of a business process in an automated way. Research question are as follows:

• What kind of (optimization) methods can be developed and applied in order to select services for process execution based upon context information?
• How to model and consider interdependencies between services when context information is used for the selection?
• How can novel methods, systems and evolutionary prototypes for mobile applications be developed that cover smart and intelligent process logic and are applicable for different domains?

A selection of current publications:

• Heinrich, Bernd und Klier, Mathias und Lewerenz, Lars und Zimmermann, Steffen (2015) Quality of Service-aware Service Selection: A Novel Approach Considering Potential Service Failures and Non-Deterministic Service Values. INFORMS Service Science, A Journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Vol. 7, No (2015) 1-22.
• Bernd Heinrich, Lars Lewerenz: A Novel Concept for the Usage of Mobile Information Services. in: Linnhoff-Popien, C.; Zaddach, M.; Grahl A. (Hrsg.), Marktplätze im Umbruch - Digitale Strategien für Services im Mobilen Internet. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg 2015, pp. 319-329.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Lewerenz, Lars (2013) QoS-aware Service Selection Considering Potential Service Failures. In: 11. Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik, 27. Februar - 1. März 2013, Leipzig.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Zimmermann, Steffen (2012) Granularity Metrics for IT Services. In: 33rd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), December 16-19, 2012, Orlando/Florida, USA.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Klier, Mathias und Zimmermann, Steffen (2011) Automatisierte Modellierung, Umsetzung und Ausführung von Prozessen – Ein Web Service-basiertes Konzept. In: 10. Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik, 16. - 18. Februar 2011, Zürich, Schweiz.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Henneberger, Matthias und Krammer, Alexander und Lautenbacher, Florian (2011) Granularity of Services – an Economic Analysis. Business & Information Systems Engineering 3 (6), S. 345-358.
• Buhl, Hans Ulrich und Heinrich, Bernd und Henneberger, Matthias und Krammer, Alexander (2008) Service Science. Wirtschaftsinformatik 50 (1), S. 60-65.