Poseidon: A framework to assist web process design based on business cases

Systems and infrastructures are currently being developed to support Web services and Web processes. One prominent solution to manage and coordinate Web services is the use of workflow technology. For more than two decades now, workflow management systems architectures, language specifications, and workflow analysis techniques have been extensively studied. While these areas of research have made the development of sophisticated workflow systems possible, one important research area that has been overlooked is the lifecycle of process application development. As a result, current process management systems support the analysis, enactment, and ad hoc design of workflows, but they lack the tools and methods to assist process design. The purpose of our study is to present a framework to assist and guide process analysts and designers in their task. The Poseidon framework includes a participative and an analytical design method. The participative phase uses a clean sheet approach and starts by constructing a business case table which captures all the business cases represented by a process. Afterward, an analytical design phase is followed where scheduling functions are derived from the business case table and are used to build the structure of a process.