A semantic model for business process patterns to support cloud deployment

Interest in cloud computing has steadily increased in the last few years, with new services continuously being introduced into the IT market by cloud vendors. Research efforts have been made to understand how business requirements can be mapped to cloud services, in order to support and ease the development of new cloud based applications, starting from business definitions expressed in standard formats, such as the business process model and notation. In most cases, business models greatly differ in structure and in the applied semantics, even when describing the very same objectives and scopes: this reflects the different points of view of the process designers. Such a situation can only make the mapping to cloud resources more complicated, since there is no clear correspondence between business tasks and cloud services. The use of Patterns for the description of both business processes and cloud applications can represent an efficient solution to such an issue, as they can help to systematize the huge variety of possible business and cloud definitions and to assess a set of pre-defined mappings which can be used as a basis for cloud deployment. In this paper we focus on the definition of a semantic based model for the representation of business process patterns, with an example of the mapping to cloud resources of such patterns.