Programming Support and Governance for Process-Oriented Software Autonomy

Business Process models seek to orchestrate business functions through the development of automated task completion, which is becoming increasingly used for Service-Oriented Architectures. This had led to many advances in the methods and tools available for software and language support in process modelling and enactment. Recent development in Business Process Execution languages, such as WS-BPEL 2.0 has widened the scope of process modelling to encompass cross-enterprise and inter-enterprise processes with a wide spread of often heterogonous business processes together with a range of associated modules for enactment, governance and assurance, to name but a few, to address non-functional requirements. Hence, the task of provisioning and managing such systems far outstrips the capabilities of human operatives, with most adaptations to operational circumstances requiring the system to be taken offline reprogrammed, recompiled and redeployed. This work focuses on the application of recent developments in language support for software autonomy whilst guaranteeing autonomic software behaviour. The issues to be addressed are stated with a supporting framework and language, Neptune. This is illustrated through a representative example with a case study evaluation reported upon.