Keywords

BPM; SOA; Application development; Orchestration; Operation and Maintenance; Industry

Abstract

While striving to increase profits in global competition, companies are trying to improve efficiency and reduce costs by outsourcing and focusing on their core functions. For operation of industrial plants this often results in provision of services even for high-priority activities such as maintenance. Integration of external information systems and service providers to business processes and information workflows brings new challenges to application development in order to support introduction of maintenance services as efficiently as possible. This paper discusses the approach of applying business process modeling and service-oriented concepts to development of supporting software applications. Business process modeling is proposed for describing service interactions and information flows, and to function as a foundation for the application development. To satisfy required flexibility in changing business environments, the applications represented as services are composed into executable process workflow orchestrations using standard Internet technologies. To validate the approach a scenario consisting of a condition monitoring process and an environment footprint estimator is presented.