Context Aware Differentiated Services Development with Configurable Business Processes

Abstract

In order to make business service more flexible and reusable, it is desirable to provide users or applications the same service but with different service quality, different interaction paths, or with different outcomes. We call this design principle as Service Differentiation. This paper describes a fully functional mechanism where variability is externalized as usage context and context aware policies so that the core business process(es) need not to be altered for any anticipated changes. Service differentiation is realized by configured business processes and interfaces, and the dynamic 'binding' between user/application with a specific interface is determined by usage context during service invocation time.