Alex Norta

Specification and verification of harmonized business-process collaborations

In the area of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are confronted with the problem of spending a considerable time and effort on coordinating suppliers across multiple tiers of their supply chains. By supporting inter-organizational business-process collaborations with service-oriented technology, a scope for more efficient and effective supply-chain coordination is anticipated. This paper defines a formal framework, called eSourcing, for specifying structurally harmonized inter-organizational business-process collaborations. The framework permits verification of harmonized processes before their enactment. Moreover, the framework uses private and public layers to protect competitive knowledge of the individual partners. In the research project CrossWork, the eSourcing framework has been integral for harmonizing on an external level the intra-organizational business processes of a service-consuming and one or many service-providing organizations.

Inter-enterprise Business Transaction Management in Open Service Ecosystems

One of the difficult challenges in inter-enterprise computing is aligning business transactions and technical management of distributed transactions, especially in breach situations. We propose and analyse a two-level business transaction management framework that allows injection of business level concerns to the control processes of inter-enterprise transactions. The two levels are associated with a) the metamodel of the collaboration, captured in eContract governing the collaboration, and b) the transactional interactions between collaboration member services. The two levels are bound together to form a reflective model, while business level breaches to the eContract can disturb the normal interactions, the metalevel possesses processes for managing (rolling back, compensating, ignoring, triggering ecosystem-level consequences) the failure in manners that align with the business incentives. This framework enables correctness, coherence and efficiency of processing in open inter-enterprise environments, i.e., service ecosystems.

A Framework for Service Outsourcing Using Process Views

Service outsourcing is a business paradigm in which an organization has a part of its business process performed by a service provider. Process views are pivotal to support this way of working. A process view shields secret or irrelevant details from a private business process, thus allowing an organization to reveal only public, relevant parts of its private business process to partner organizations. The paper introduces a conceptual framework to support service outsourcing using process views. The framework gives rules that can be used to construct a process view from a conceptual process and vice versa. Based on these rules, the framework defines several projection relations that can exist between conceptual processes of consumers and providers and their process views. Finally, the framework gives a set of configuration options that specify which combinations of projection relations are useful for service consumers and service providers. The framework is applied in a BPEL-based case study.

Constructing process views for service outsourcing

Service outsourcing is a business paradigm in which an organization has a part of its business process performed by a service provider. The outsourced service can be specified in a public process view, which shields secret or irrelevant details from the internal business process of the provider. This way, the provider can reveal only public, relevant parts of its private business process to the client organization. To allow efficient monitoring and control by a consumer, a provider can offer a public activity as either invokable or observable.

Utility Evaluation of Tools for Collaborative Development and Maintenance of Ontologies

Ontologies lend themselves for resolving ambiguities in a wide range of applications, including mashups from diverse third-party information sources, and human-and machine-readable specifications of electronic business services (eBS). While tool support exists for the development and maintenance of ontologies, the question remains unanswered what is the degree of utility of these tools in the context of ambiguity resolution, e.g., while discovering eBS. In this paper, we fill the gap by performing an ontology-tool evaluation that allows a comparison of their utility. Based on a carefully selected set of requirements and criteria, we conduct a survey involving leading ontology-tool providers. One of the principal requirements is the collaborative ontology development and maintenance. The paper provides a detailed analysis of survey results.

Business Process Composition

This chapter describes the realization of the business process composition cluster in the CrossWork architecture. Business process composition is concerned with automated means for constructing business processes in a dynamically forged virtual organization. A business process is operationalized in a workflow, which can be supported by workflow management technology. We first introduce several perspectives for business process collaborations and discuss how they relate to each other. Next, the languages used for process specification are presented. We examine the workflow composition module, which provides support for (semi-) automatic composition of global workflows from local workflows of members in a VE. Before a composed workflow can be used in practice, it needs to be tested – this is discussed in the next subsection. The interfaces used for the transfer of a composed workflow to its execution environment are subsequently discussed in this chapter.

Comparable approaches to IVE

In this chapter we examine some approaches to VE formation and Business Network management which are comparable, at least in aspirations, to CrossWork. In each case, we present the principal ideas and main results and use these to distinguish the differences while highlighting the complementary aspects.

A choreography language for eBusiness collaboration

Automating business collaboration with means of service-oriented and cloud computing, promises significant efficiency and effectiveness increases. The development of available choreography languages for automating inter-organizationally connected business processes, is typically driven by political and technical concerns and focuses less on suitability and expressiveness. A choreography describes the observable collaboration behavior between two or many business partners. Suitability means that choreography languages comprise concepts to allow the formulation of real-world business-collaboration scenarios in many perspectives. On the other hand, a choreography language must be expressive for automated setup and enactment. Expressiveness means, the constructs of a choreography language have semantic clarity for ensuring uniform enactment behavior by application systems. To address the gap, this paper presents a choreography language for electronic business collaborations.

Introduction to the second international workshop on service oriented computing in logistics (SOC-LOG 2010)

The purpose of the SOC-LOG workshop was to present and discuss recent significant developments at the intersection of service-oriented computing and logistics systems/supply chain management, and to promote crossfertilization and exchange of ideas and techniques between these fields. The relation to ICSOC 2010 is that, on one hand, the conference addresses the core concepts such as interacting business processes, service composition, service operations, and quality of services, and on the other hand, would receive feedback, experiences, and requirements from a highly relevant application domain to validate and advance its current approaches. The technical program consisted of 4 full papers, 1 position paper (all being reviewed, with an acceptance rate of 56%), and 1 invited talk.