Towards reuse of business processes patterns to design services.

Service Oriented Architecture is a promising architectural approach to solve the integration problem originated by business process integration and automation requirements. Defining the appropriate granularity and scope of services is a critical issue to allow their reuse. Architecture abstractions, such as patterns, are a medium to capture design knowledge and to allow the reuse of successful previous designs. The continual rise of abstraction in software engineering approaches have been a central driver of this work, placing the notion of patterns at business model level. In this paper we propose a set of pattern-based techniques to define the scope and granularity of services based on identified patterns in business process models. Graph-based pattern matching and pattern discovery are proposed to recommend the scope and granularity of services on process-centric description models. Matching of generalised patterns and hierarchical matching are discussed.