Higher-Order Process Engineering: The Technical Background

Abstract

Business process modeling solutions aim at tightly involving the application expert in the software development process to avoid common and costly `communication accidents' during requirements engineering and to decrease time to market. Their popularity, in particular of the recent standard BPMN 2.0, clearly indicates the need for this new involvement. At the same time there are unexpected hurdles when it comes to dealing with integration, (runtime) variability, and interoperability. Higher-order process engineering (HOPE) elegantly overcomes these hurdles as even in its simplicity-oriented version it allows for a powerful plug&play fashion, where processes and services can be moved around just like data. This document provides the technical background to the concepts of HOPE.