Enterprises have to deal with an increasingly fast changing market situation. That is the reason why business processes in companies need to be changed more frequently than a few years ago. Fig. 1 shows the development of cycle times for business processes and delivery times of IT solutions since 1980. The average cycle time for necessary changes of business processes have decreased since the year 1980 by 84 months to six months. The delivery of IT solutions decreased from 30 month to three month. [GREV 04; p. 4]
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) should support enterprises to deal with this situation. Deutsche Post was one of the first companies worldwide, which have started to realize a SOA. Deutsche Post decided in 1999 to develop their own Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) because at that time, there was still not an appropriate product on the market. Since 2007, Sopera GmbH was founded to
carry on the development and offer that product under the name “SOPERA” on the open source-market. SOPERA includes the ESB and tools for developing services.
Depending on the understanding of the term ESB (para. 2.1.3.6), a standalone ESB does not provide all the components which are necessary to deal with the requirements in today’s businesses. For creating and changing business processes quickly (that means daily or weekly, e.g. because of a decision of the marketing department), a component for service orchestration and choreography (para. 5.1.3) is needed, based on a common standard like the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL, para. 5.1.1). During the execution of business processes, the processes and their services also have to be monitored, measured and continuously optimized as shown in fig. 2 from Gartner.
To do this, the concepts of Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) have to be used to extend the functionality of the ESB which does not offer that. That is the reason why it was decided to use third party products for such tasks. Oracle and Deutsche Post already had in the past a business relationship and Oracle offers with its big array of products all components, which are complemental and easy to integrate into SOPERA. So, it was decided to see if it is possible to integrate Oracle components into the SOA Framework of Sopera/Deutsche Post and to test the functionality and quality by means of a typical business process of Deutsche Post. Combining the technologies of Business Process Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Complex Event Processing (CEP), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA and Event Driven Architecture (EDA) a new term is just
created and will be defined in the upcoming Springer Encyclopedia of Database Systems: Event Driven Business Process Management System [LiTa 08].
The topic of this diploma thesis is the prototypical integration of the Oracle products
• Oracle BPEL (Business Process Management),
• Oracle BAM (Business Activity Monitoring),
• Oracle CEP (Complex Event Processing)
within the SOPERA system environment, with the focus on CEP, which will become a future product of Oracle. For evaluating the capabilities of the components, a business process regarding to shipment, investigation and claim has to be modeled and implemented. Some different approaches are discussed, evaluated and implemented prototypically. The focus of the implementation is to provide events for the purpose of monitoring the business process.