Modeling and Composing Service-Based and Reference Process-Based Multi-enterprise Processes

Abstract

Multi-enterprise processes (MEPs) are workflows consisting of a set of activities that are implemented by different enterprises. Tightly coupled Virtual Enterprises (VEs) typically agree on abstract MEPs (reference MEPs), to which each enterprise contributes single-enterprise processes (SEPs) that implement and refine the activities in the reference MEP. On the other end of the spectrum, loosely coupled VEs use service-based MEPs that fuse together heterogeneous services implemented and provided by different enterprises. Existing process models usually couple activities with their implementation. Therefore, they cannot effectively support such MEPs. In this paper, we introduce a Polymorphic Process Model (PPM) that supports both reference process-and service-based MEPs. To accomplish this, PPM decouples activity interface from activity implementation, and provides process polymorphism to support their mapping. In particular, PPM determines activity types from the activity interfaces, permits activity interface subtyping, and provides for the mapping of MEP activity types to concrete implementations via interface matching. We illustrate that these key PPM capabilities permit the late binding and use of multiple activity implementations within a MEP without modifying the MEP at run time or enumerating the alternative implementation at specification time.

Automatic Composition of E-services That Export Their Behavior

“…Current research in description and modeling of e-Services is mainly founded on the work on workflows, which model business processes as sequences of (possibly partially) automated activities, in terms of data and control flow among them (e.g., [18,19]). In [14] e-Services are represented as statecharts, and in [7], an e-Service is modeled as a Mealy machine, with input and output messages, and a queue is used to buffer messages that were received but not yet processed.…”

Towards a Semantic Framework for Service Description

“…Some recent approaches to business-to-business e-commerce [Casati et al, 2000;Schuster et al, 2000;Jennings et al, 2000], view a service as a simple or a complex task or activity, executed within an organisation on behalf of a customer or organisation. In other words, services are seen as abstractions of business processes.…”

Domain Knowledge-Based Automatic Workflow Generation

“…Platforms for developing composite e-services proposed in eFlow [6], E-speak [11], and CMI (Collaboration Management Infrastructure) [15] are compositional models, similar to our approach. However, their design of e-services (compositional process) is still manual, while our approach uses a workflow definition model where the workflow task selection and ordering knowledge is explicitly modeled for automating the generation of the workflow definition.…”