Dynamic integration of public and private business processes

Abstract

The rapidly changing landscape of business has given rise to the need for enterprises to be quick and agile when it comes to business collaboration with other companies. Companies can no longer afford to have collaboration systems that are both rigid and costly in a rapidly changing world. They need to be able to collaborate quickly and effectively with new business partners “on-the-fly”.

Genesis, which was developed as a solution to dynamic B2B collaboration, allows enterprises to dynamically collaborate with each other via Web Services (WS). WS allow companies to execute their business processes (BP) via any network (i.e. Internet, Intranet), thus allowing for flexibility and speed of processing. Given certain user-defined business goals, Genesis generates public business processes by means of an algorithm.

However, the current Genesis is unable to dynamically link the public business processes to private business processes. Therefore, the objective of this project is to bridge this gap by finding patterns of interaction between public business processes generated by Genesis and the Web Services that will execute these processes.

Web Service Interaction patterns from the paper on Service Interaction Patterns by researchers from the Workflow Management Group [1] was adapted for use in this project. These patterns were then complemented with additional descriptions on the interactions proposed by the author.

Based on the adapted patterns, a Transition Point ontology linking the appropriate Web Services to public business processes generated by Genesis was created. This ontology was stored in OWL, permits the merging of other ontologies in the same format to create new knowledge.

Future work such as the verification of business processes within Genesis and the testing of the Transition Point ontology was proposed in the final chapter, together with the conclusion for this project.