A Process for Developing Adaptable and Open Service Systems: Application in Supply Chain Management

Service-oriented computing is becoming increasingly popular. It allows designing flexible and adaptable software systems that can be easily adopted on demand by software customers. Those benefits are from primary importance in the context of supply chain management; that is why this paper proposes to apply ProDAOSS, a process for developing adaptable and open service systems to an industrial case study in outbound logistics. ProDAOSS is conceived as a plug-in for I-Tropos - a broader development methodology - so that it covers the whole software development life cycle. At analysis level, flexible business processes were generically modelled with different complementary views. First of all, an aggregate services view of the whole applicative package is offered; then services are split using an agent ontology - through the i* framework - to represent it as an organization of agents. A dynamic view completes the documentation by offering the service realization paths. At design stage, the service center architecture proposes a reference architectural pattern for services realization in an adaptable and open manner.