An emergency response process outlines the workflow of different activities that need to be performed in response to an emergency. Effective emergency response requires communication and coordination with the operational systems belonging to different collaborating organizations. Therefore, it is necessary to establish information sharing and system-level interoperability among the diverse operational systems. Unlike typical e-government processes that are well structured and have a well-defined outcome, emergency response processes are knowledge-centric and their workflow structure and execution may evolve as the incident unfolds. It is impractical to define static plans and response process workflows for every possible situation. Instead, a dynamic response should be adaptable to the changing situation. We present an integrated approach that facilitates the dynamic composition of an executable response process. The proposed approach employs ontology-based reasoning to determine the default actions and resource requirements for the given incident and to identify relevant response organizations based on their jurisdictional and mutual aid agreement rules. The Web service APIs of the identified response organizations are then used to generate an executable response process that evolves dynamically. The proposed approach is implemented and experimentally validated using an example scenario derived from the FEMA Hazardous Materials Tabletop Exercises Manual.

Development of a Business Process (BP) is a challenging task for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) which often do not have adequate resources for design, coding, and management of their BPs. Knowledge of existing BPs of related organizations can be exploited for collaborative BP development. However, syntactic and semantic heterogeneity among the Web service operations of BPs across organizations is a major obstacle to such collaborative BP development. In this paper, we propose an approach for collaborative BP development that exploits the attribute and structural similarity of related BPs as well as the semantic information including preconditions and postconditions of operations, to compute a mapping between the available service operations of the user organization and the BP operations of other organizations. We experimentally evaluate the approach with real world data from e-commerce sales BPs and demonstrate its effectiveness.

Business Process (BP) composition is a challenging task for small and medium organizations that do not have sufficient resources for design, coding, and management of their BPs. Cloud infrastructure and service-oriented middleware can be leveraged for rapid development and deployment of BPs of such organizations. BP development in the cloud-based environment can be done by exploiting the knowledge of existing BPs of related organizations. In this demonstration, we present the BP- Com tool which is a Web-based interactive system that enables efficient development of BPs in the cloud. BP-Com implements our service mapping approach called ASSEMBLE that utilizes the attribute, structural and semantics information of service operations of existing BPs in a given domain to help a user organization to compose its BP. Given a collection of related BPs and available service operations of a user organization, BP-Com computes a mapping between the available service operations of the user organization and the BP operations of other organizations. The results of operation mapping are presented to the user for refinement and customization of the generated BP workflow. Executable BP code is then generated in standard BPEL language, which can be deployed on any process execution engine on the user organization's site or on the cloud.