Business process integration by using general rule markup language

Abstract

A business process usually includes multiple business partners that use systems with their business logics represented in different rule (or policy) languages. The integration of business processes is a major goal followed by business enterprises and involves the interchange of business rules and policies between partners. However, the variety of business rules employed by the partners presents a significant burden to the integration of collaborating business systems. In this paper, we propose a solution that enables translating rules and policies defined in different rule languages into a single general rule language (REWERSE II Rule Markup Language - R2ML) and processing them in a uniform manner. This provides a unified view of different partners' business rules in an integration process, while permitting the partners to continue to leverage their own business rules without changing their technologies. We show how the concepts of the KAoS policy language can be transformed to R2ML and then from R2ML to the other rule (or policy) languages.