From trading to eCommunity management: Responding to social and contractual challenges

Abstract

The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware.

Automating Decisions for Inter-Enterprise Collaboration Management

“…Second, the populator [7] acts as a secretary for the initiator and seeks suggestions for the missing role players in the business network model through service offer repositories. The populator only acts on the public information and is expected to ensure that the selected offers form an interoperable collaboration community according to the rules of the business network model.…”

“…In the network of autonomous enterprises, a flow of reputation information about the business services is organized: each time a collaboration ends successfully or to a breach situation, positive or negative recommendation can be sent to others. The reputation information can then be used for selecting service offers to new collaborations, and effectively implementing a social regulation system to the overall architecture [7]. The trustworthiness of the reputation information must be taken to account.…”

“…The techniques for avoiding these vulnerabilities include the use of metapolicies for grouping decision situations to routine cases and human-decidable, adjustable thresholds for different types of operational situations for positive and negative routine decisions, and finally building of systemic trust into population and negotiation processes as well as into Pilarcos middleware information repositories. The thresholds were already mentioned in Section 2; systemic trust on Pilarcos middleware level is left to be discussed elsewhere [7]. As the remaining element, we discuss metapolicies.…”

“…In this area, the Pilarcos architecture provides B2B middleware support for forming and managing loosely-coupled business networks of autonomous actors [7,9,19]. Its tasks include partner selection and negotiation, interoperability tests for technical and business aspects of services (such as technical communication interoperability and sufficient match in meeting business processes), collaboration lifecycle management with partner changes, and breach management.…”

“…The service providers are autonomous: they publish a service offer as an indication of a willingness to provide a given service at given terms and they make independent decisions on whether to join, continue in or leave an eContracted community [7,9].…”