Patent ID: 8904341

Claim:
A method of modelling a business process having a number of computer implemented steps using software application components, to enable automatic deployment on computing infrastructure, the method having the steps of: automatically deriving grounded models of the business process from unbound models of the business process, the unbound models specifying the application components to be used for each of the computer implemented steps of the business process, without a complete design of the computing infrastructure, and the grounded models specifying a complete design of the computing infrastructure suitable for automatic deployment of the business process, wherein each grounded model is associated with a particular period of time for deployment, deriving each grounded model of the grounded models has the steps of: providing an infrastructure design template having predetermined parts of the computing infrastructure, predetermined relationships between the parts, and having a limited number of options to be completed from an allowable range of options associated with the infrastructure design template, generating a candidate grounded model by generating a completed candidate infrastructure design based on the infrastructure design template, and generating a candidate configuration of the software application components used by an unbound model of the unbound models, and evaluating the candidate grounded model, to determine if the candidate grounded model can be used as that grounded model.