Introduction
The recently coined term «Event-Driven Business Process Management» (EDBPM) is nowadays an enhancement of BPM by new concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Software as a Service (SaaS), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). In this context BPM means a software platform which provides companies the ability to model, manage, and optimize these processes for significant gain. As an independent system, CEP is a parallel running platform that analyses and processes events. The BPM- and the CEP-platform correspond via events which are produced by the BPM-workflow engine and by the – if distributed - IT services which are associated with the business process steps. Also events coming from different event sources in different forms can trigger a business process or influence the execution of a process or a service, which can result in another event. Even more, the correlation of these events in a particular context can be treated as a complex, business level event, relevant for the execution of other business processes or services. A business process – arbitrarily fine or coarse grained – can be seen as a service again and can be “choreographed” with other business processes or services, even between different enterprises and organizations.
Loosely coupled event-driven architecture for BPM provides significant benefits:
- Responsiveness. Events can occur at any time from any source and processes respond to them immediately, whenever they happen and wherever they happen.
- Agility. New processes can be modeled, implemented, deployed, and optimized more quickly in response to changing business requirements.
- Flexibility. Processes can span heterogeneous platforms and programming languages. Participating applications can be upgraded or changed without breaking the process model.