Mining inter-organizational business process models from EDI messages : a case study from the automotive sector

Traditional standards for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), such as EDIFACT and ANSI X12, have been employed in Business-to-Business (B2B) e-commerce for decades. Due to their wide industry coverage and long-standing establishment, they will presumably continue to play an important role for some time. EDI systems are typically not "process-aware", i.e., messages are standardized but processes simply "emerge". However, to improve performance and to enhance the control, it is important to understand and analyze the "real" processes supported by these systems. In the case study presented in this paper we uncover the inter-organizational business processes of an automotive supplier company by analyzing the EDIFACT messages that it receives from its business partners. We start by transforming a set of observed messages to an event log, which requires that the individual messages are correlated to process instances. Thereby, we make use of the specific structure of EDIFACT messages. Then we apply process mining techniques to uncover the inter-organizational business processes. Our results show that inter-organizational business process models can be derived by analyzing EDI messages that are exchanged in a network of organizations

Evolving Services from a Contractual Perspective

International audienceIn an environment of constant change, driven by competitionand innovation, a service can rarely remain stable - especially when it de-pends on other services to fulfill its functionality. However, uncontrolledchanges can easily break the existing relationships between a service andits environment (its customers and providers). In this paper we presentan approach that allows for the controlled evolution of a service by lever-aging the loosely-coupled nature of the SOA paradigm. More specifically,we formalize the notion of contracts between interacting services that en-able their independent evolution and we investigate under which criteriacan changes to a contract-bound service, or even to the contract itself,be transparent to the environment of the service.Keywords: service evolution, service contracts, compatibility, contractinvariance, contract evolutio

Fine-Grained Compatibility and Replaceability Analysis of Timed Web Service Protocols

Abstract. We deal with the problem of automated analysis of web service protocol compatibility and replaceability in presence of timing abstractions. We first present a timed protocol model for services and identify different levels of compatibility and replaceability that are useful to support service development and evolution. Next, we present operators that can perform such analysis. Finally, we present operators properties by showing that timed protocols form a new class of timed automata, and we briefly present our implementation.