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Process Orchestration can simply be defined as the coordination of events and activities in a process at technical levels, to help achieve objectives laid down by the business. From an SOA perspective, orchestration involves direction and management of multiple component services to create a composite application or an end-to-end process. While orchestration tends to imply a single central engine performing the coordination act, another overlapping concept of choreography applies to sharing this coordination activity across multiple autonomous systems.

BPM Architecture and Role of Business Process Orchestration

While we are covering orchestration  for SOA, it is worthwhile to also discuss reference architecture for BPM, to understand how all components of technology fit together for modeling, executing, monitoring, and optimizing a business process. Following an architecture-lead approach, as always, is a good way to initially guide BPM projects. It is not necessary to implement all aspects of this architecture from day one, but as we mature with our BPM implementation, its coverage can be increased to gain maximum value.

From the perspective of this article, this reference architecture provides an understanding of how process execution and orchestration is a core activity in bridging the abstract business models and underlying SOA infrastructure.

If you look at the following architecture for BPM, you will realize that it is divided into layers and groups. The vertical right side covers the aspects of modeling the processes, business rules, and services.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

The horizontal stack starts with the presentation layer, which allows multiple channels through which a company’s customers, employees, and partners can interact. It could be a web portal, a hand-held device, and so on.

These channels are supported by the process orchestration layer, which assists in orchestrating different aspects of a business process to provide information to respective users in a channel.

In this layer, we will have a process engine that will take inputs from the presentation layer and interface with underlying technologies and services to complete an end-to-end process. This layer will be responsible for ensuring that information is gathered from all sources at the right time, to enable a smooth process flow. The requirements for process orchestration will be fed by the activities performed by the business modeling team and the development teams, working on the process models using standards such as BPMN and BPEL.

The orchestration layer will then interface with what we call ‘Enterprise Services’, which could be business services, technical services, or utility services, available either as basic services, or a composition of multiple services required to support the process orchestration.

To enable access to these enterprise-level services, we will have an integration layer or an Enterprise Service Bus, which will provide a standards-based interface to multiple systems within or outside the organization, and also human service providers. We also have a layer of data management services that will be different high-level data sources that the BPM landscape will use. An example is a service registry to manage multiple services or metadata, which will manage information about all of the available data sources in the landscape to which this process has access.

On the vertical left side, we have the monitoring services, which will capture all the events generated by the process to help in analyzing the process performance against key performance indicators laid down by the business.

As we move ahead in this article, we will use this reference architecture to understand how various technology components fit together.

Let us now go ahead with an example to see how we can orchestrate a process using Oracle BPEL Process Manager.

Executing BPEL Processes in BPEL Process Manager

One of the fundamental benefits of using a BPM system for modeling a business process – in this case the Oracle suite of products – is to allow models created using BPMN at the business level to be executed, and to automate manual processes. It also allows a business to evaluate gaps in current processes and identify the remedial actions that can be implemented quickly using the execution engine.

When working on the example for the ‘Portfolio Account Opening’ process, we created the business process model using BPMN, analyzed the process, converted the BPMN model into a process blueprint to be shared by the development teams, filled the technical gaps, and enriched and finally deployed the process to the BPEL Process Manager.

Let us take the next step in understanding how our deployed process will work, and the functionality it offers to the users working on this process. Our aim is to make you aware of how process-driven SOA works for an end-to-end process. This explanation assumes that you have some working knowledge of BPEL constructs such as activities, partnerlinks and so on. XSD and WSDL are used with in the JDeveloper environment to create and deploy BPEL processes. For a detailed understanding of BPEL and its complex constructs, you may want to refer to these resources. For our case, we will use a simplistic representation of information, tasks and moving from one task to another.

Let us go through a series of steps to trigger an instance of the account opening process:

Initiation of the Process Instance

First, let us initiate the services related to SOA Suite. You can open them by selecting Start SOA suite from the Program menu.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

After the SOA suite services have started, we will open the SOA Launch Console, which provides a dashboard for all tools under the SOA suite that can be accessed from this location. To open the console, you can either enter the URL, which is typically http://localhost:8888; unless you have specified something specific during your installation. You can also access the console from the Program menu and select SOA Launch Console.

The following screenshot shows what the SOA Suite console looks like. And As you can see, it provides, in addition to from all the product literature and technical guides, links to the main components of the SOA suite including BPEL Control, which is highlighted in the image.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

Open the Oracle BPEL Process Manager administration interface by clicking the BPEL Control link to access the details of the account opening process we deployed earlier.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

The first screen we see is the Process Dashboard, which provides us with the information on the currently-deployed processes in the database. As we can see, we have our ‘Portfolio Account Opening Process’. There are currently some instances of the processes already running, and some instances have completed recently.

To test the flow of the process and its behavior, trigger a new process instance for the deployed process through this console. To do this, click on the ‘Portfolio_Account_Opening_Process‘ link on the dashboard to access details of our deployed process, and initiate a new instance. In a production environment, this step could be automated through a customized graphical interface. We will use the BPEL Process Manager to initiate this test process.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

As you can see, the BPEL process Portfolio_Account_Opening_Process has been deployed from the development environment inside the BPEL Process Manager. To initiate the process instance, we have used a simple string as the input. In this case, we will just start the process by providing Open Account as the payload string, and posting the XML message to initiate the process instance.

To check whether the process instance has started, we can view the visual flow for the instance by clicking the visual flow link.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

The following visual flow shows that we have triggered the instance of the process, and it has reached a stage where the bank has received the application.

Business Process Driven SOA using BPMN and BPEL

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