An investigation into inputs and outputs of collaborative business process (CBP) tasks

Abstract

In this era of globalization, companies collaborate with one another to pool their

resources as well as to remain in the competition. In the collaboration, some business processes of each of the organizations are linked together, these are identified as collaborative Business Processes (cBPs). Some Business Process Management (BPM) and Business-to-Business (B2B) systems have been introduced but these

systems are often costly to implement and rigid, leading to a lack of adoption. On top

of that, no system has been able to dynamically formulate business processes from a given set of business goals and constraints.

The Genesis methodology, created by the team in A*STAR Integrated Manufacturing Services and Systems (IMSS), is one that has been successful in formulating dynamic cBP by decomposing high level B2B business goals, criteria,and compound tasks into operational level, granular tasks ideal for direct Web

service execution. This is done by dynamic sequencing of primitive tasks through

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning algorithm and a Web ontology (BOWL)

that supports the hierarchical decompositions and ordering of cBP tasks. However, the Genesis + BOWL system’s lack of description of the tasks’ inputs and outputs

makes it impossible to match and invoke the right Web Service to execute each task.

In this report, the author presents TIBOD, short for Task Input-Behaviour-Output

Description, a method which provides a rich description of each executable BOWL

task in terms of inputs, outputs, and its behaviour. TIBOD is modelled as a Web

ontology, a machine readable format that can be merged with BOWL, and be used to

scope down to matching Web services to realize the dynamically generated task

sequence.