Web Services Support for Dynamic Business Process Outsourcing

Outsourcing of business processes is crucial for organizations to be effective, efficient and flexible. To meet fast-changing market conditions, dynamic outsourcing is required, in which business relationships are established and enacted on-the-fly in an adaptive, fine-grained way unrestricted by geographic distance. This requires automated means for both the establishment of outsourcing relationships and for the enactment of services performed in these relationships over electronic channels. Due to wide industry support and the underlying model of loose coupling of services, Web services increasingly become the mechanism of choice to connect organizations across organizational boundaries. This paper analyzes to which extent Web services support the dynamic process outsourcing paradigm. We discuss contract -based dynamic business process outsourcing to define requirements and then introduce the Web services framework. Based on this, we investigate the match between the two. We observe that the Web services framework requires further support for cross - organizational business processes and mechanisms for contracting, QoS management and process-based transaction support and suggest ways to fill those gaps

CrossFlow: Integrating Workflow Management and Electronic Commerce

The CrossFlow1 architecture provides support for cross-organisational workflow management in dynamically established virtual enterprises. The creation of a business relationship between a service provider organisation performing a service on behalf of a consumer organisation can be made dynamic when augmented by virtual market technology, the dynamic configuration of the contract enactment infrastructures, and the provision of fine grained service monitoring and control. Standard ways of describing services and contracts can be combined with matchmaking technology to create a virtual market for such service provision and consumption. A provider can then advertise its services in the market and consumers can search for a compatible business partner. This provides choice in selecting a partner and allows the deferment of the decision to a point in time where it can be made on the most up-to-date requirements of the consumer and service offers in the market. The penalty for deferred decision making is the time to set up the infrastructure in each organisation for the dynamically established contract. Thus, a further aspect of CrossFlow was to exploit the contract in the dynamic and automatic configuration of the contract enactment and supervision infrastructures of the respective organisations and in linking them in a dynamic fashion. The electronic contract, which results from the agreement between the newly established business partners, completely specifies the intended collaboration between them. Given the importance of the business process enacted by the provider, this includes fine-grained monitoring and control to allow tight co-operation between the organisations

WEB service interfaces for inter-organisational business processes an infrastructure for automated reconciliation

For the majority of front-end e-business systems, the assumption of a coherent and homogeneous set of interfaces is highly unrealistic. Problems start in the back-end, with systems characterised by a heterogeneous mix of applications and business processes. Integration can be complex and expensive, as systems evolve more in accordance with business needs than with technical architectures. E-business systems are faced with the challenge to give a coherent image of a diversified reality. Web services make business interfaces more efficient, but effectiveness is a business requirement of at least comparable importance. We propose a technique for automatic reconciliation of the Web service interfaces involved in inter-organisational business processes. The working assumption is that the Web service front-end of each company is represented by a set of WSDL and WSCL interfaces. The result of our reconciliation method is a common interface that all the parties can effectively enforce. Indications are also given on ways to adapt individual interfaces to the common one. The technique was embodied in a prototype that we also present

Business roles and negotiation models for Web service based provision

The emergence of XML as the lingua franca for communication among applications over the Web, the recent advances in service oriented computing and in web service architectures and the applicability of these technologies in the area of eCommerce necessitates the conceptualisation of business roles and negotiation models for web service based provision. According to the web service paradigm it is envisaged that services will be provided to customers based on dynamic web service composition. This places additional requirements to SLA negotiation in comparison to the traditional service provision paradigm where negotiation for service was performed with a single service provider system. This paper addresses the research challenges with regard to SLA negotiation for web service based provision and outlines business roles and a negotiation model for establishing SLAs with multiple web service providers in order to offer combined web service functionality to match user needs

A flexible architecture for privacy-aware trust management

In service-oriented systems a constellation of services cooperate, sharing potentially sensitive information and responsibilities. Cooperation is only possible if the different participants trust each other. As trust may depend on many different factors, in a flexible framework for Trust Management (TM) trust must be computed by combining different types of information. In this paper we describe the TAS3 TM framework which integrates independent TM systems into a single trust decision point. The TM framework supports intricate combinations whilst still remaining easily extensible. It also provides a unified trust evaluation interface to the (authorization framework of the) services. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach by integrating three distinct TM paradigms: reputation-based TM, credential-based TM, and Key Performance Indicator TM. Finally, we discuss privacy concerns in TM systems and the directions to be taken for the definition of a privacy-friendly TM architecture.\u

Component Based System Framework for Dynamic B2B Interaction

Business-to-business (B2B) collaboration is becoming a pivotal way to bring today's enterprises to success in the dynamically changing, e-business environment. Though many business-to-business protocols are developed to support B2B interaction, none are generally accepted. A B2B system should support different B2B protocols dynamically to enable interaction between diverse enterprises. This paper proposes a framework for dynamic B2B interaction. A B2B transaction is divided into the interaction part and business implementation part to support flexible interaction. A component based system framework is proposed,to support the B2B transaction execution. To support. dynamic B2B services, dynamic component composition is required. Service and component notions are combined into a composable service component. The composition architecture is also presented

A Three-Level Process Framework for Contract-Based Dynamic Service Outsourcing

Service outsourcing is the business paradigm, in which an organization has part of its business process performed by a service provider. In dynamic markets, service providers are selected on the fly during process enactment. The cooperation between the parties is\ud specified in a dynamically made electronic contract. This contract includes a process specification that is tailored towards service matchmaking and crossorganizational process enactment and hence has to conform to specific market and specification standards. Process enactment, however, relies on intraorganizational process specifications that have to comply with the infrastructure available in an organization. In this position paper, we present a three-level process specification framework for dynamic contract-based\ud service outsourcing. This framework relates the two process specification levels through a third, conceptual level. This approached is inspired by the well-known ANSI-SPARC model for data management. We show how the framework can be placed in the context of infrastructures for cross-organizational process support

A language for information commerce processes

Automatizing information commerce requires languages to represent the typical information commerce processes. Existing languages and standards cover either only very specific types of business models or are too general to capture in a concise way the specific properties of information commerce processes. We introduce a language that is specifically designed for information commerce. It can be directly used for the implementation of the processes and communication required in information commerce. It allows to cover existing business models that are known either from standard proposals or existing information commerce applications on the Internet. The language has a concise logical semantics. In this paper we present the language concepts and an implementation architecture