As concepts for fast, efficient and low-cost development of high quality, flexibly adjustable business application systems, the following concepts in particular are currently being discussed both in science and in practice:

• Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)
• Business Process Management Systeme (BPMS)
• Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

There are substantial developments in all three areas; the technologies on which they are based are already being successfully used in practice. In many cases, however, the practical applications are pilot projects carried out by large companies in testing these technologies and developing procedures for their successful use in large, mission-critical systems.

The basic issues that have not been sufficiently clarified for wide use in practice are:

How can the three approaches mentioned be combined into an overall concept, so that from a consistent description of the processes to be supported and the required functionalities, both the necessary services themselves, their cooperation within the framework of a SOA, and the control flow definition for the higher-level process control in a BPMS can be generated using the MDA approach?

How can the consistency of business process models created from a business perspective up to the finished software be ensured in order to guarantee on the one hand that the business requirements are implemented correctly and that the business objectives associated with the software development are achieved, and on the other hand that necessary changes to the business processes are implemented directly in the software?

With this background the project "Business Driven Architecture" aims to create a consistent example implementation of an integrated SOA/BPM/MDA scenario to support a business process and to study relevant questions of applied research based on this.

Project partners: IDS Scheer AG, Saarbrücken