2 research outputs found
Middleware to support accountability of business to business interactions
PhD ThesisEnabling technologies have driven standardisation efforts specifying B2B interactions
between organisations including the information to be exchanged and its associated
business level requirements. These interactions are encoded as conversations to which
organisations agree and execute. It is pivotal to continued cooperation with these interactions
that their regulation be supported; minimally, that all actions taken are held
accountable and no participant is placed at a disadvantage having remained compliant.
Technical protocols exist to support regulation (e.g., provide fairness and accountability).
However, such protocols incur expertise, infrastructure and integration requirements,
possibly diverting an organisation’s attention from fulfilling obligations to
interactions in which they are involved. Guarantees provided by these protocols can
be paired with functional properties, declaratively describing the support they provide.
By encapsulating properties and protocols in intermediaries through which messages are
routed, expertise, infrastructure and integration requirements can be alleviated from
interacting organisations while their interactions are transparently provided with additional
support.
Previous work focused on supporting individual issues without tackling concerns of
asynchronicity, transparency and loose coupling. This thesis develops on previous work
by designing generalised intermediary middleware capable of intercepting messages and
transparently satisfying supportive properties. By enforcing loose coupling and transparency,
all interactions may be provided with additional support without modification,
independent of the higher level (i.e., B2B) standards in use and existing work may be
expressed as instances of the proposed generalised design. This support will be provided
at lower levels, justified by a survey of B2B and messaging standards. Proof of concept
implementations will demonstrate the suitability of the approach. The work will demonstrate
that providing transparent, decoupled support at lower levels of abstraction is
useful and can be applied to domains beyond B2B and message oriented interactions.EPSRC
Hat’s Newcastle operation
Dr. Mark Littl