SLA-driven business process management in SOA

In a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), distributed applications are built by orchestrating reusable services using high-level workflows or business processes. The complexity of developing and maintaining these processes is addressed by SOA development cycles that identify the roles of participants at each stage. To assist development, sophisticated tools have been developed, such as the IBM® WebSphere® suite of SOA products. However, the development, administration and maintenance of a business process still requires much manual effort that can be automated. In particular, the non-functional goals of a business process, often expressed as Service Level Agreements (SLA) need to be manually considered at each stage of the development process.