QoS-Enabled B2B Integration

Business-To-Business Integration (B2Bi) is a key mechanism for enterprises to gain competitive advantage. However, developing B2Bi applications is far from trivial. Inter alia, agreement among integration partners about the business documents and the control flow of business document exchanges as well as applying suitable communication technologies for overcoming heterogeneous IT landscapes are major challenges. At the same time, choreography languages such as ebXML BPSS (ebBP), orchestration languages such as WS-BPEL and Web Services are promising to provide the foundations for seamless interactions among business partners. Automatically translating choreography agreements of integration partners into partner-specific orchestrations is an obvious idea for ensuring conformance of orchestration models to choreography models. Moreover, the application of such model-driven development methods facilitates productivity and cost-effectiveness whereas applying a service oriented architecture (SOA) based on WS-BPEL and Web Services leverages standardization and decoupling. By now, the realization of QoS attributes has not yet received the necessary attention that makes such approaches suitable for B2Bi. In this report, we describe a proof-of-concept implementation of the translation of ebBP choreographies into WS-BPEL orchestrations that respects B2Bi-relevant QoS attributes

QoS-Enabled Business-to-Business Integration Using ebBP to WS-BPEL Translations

Business-To-Business Integration (B2Bi) is a key mechanism for enterprises to gain competitive advantage. However, developing B2Bi applications is far from trivial. Inter alia, agreement among integration partners about the business documents and the control flow of business document exchanges, applying suitable communication technologies for overcoming heterogeneous IT landscapes as well as ensuring a Quality of Service (QoS) level that is sufficient for B2Bi are major challenges. In this context, applying choreography languages like ebXML BPSS (ebBP) for agreement among integration partners, orchestration languages like WS-BPEL for specifying partner-specific behavior, and Web Services for communication promises seamless interactions among business partners. In this scenario, the conformance of orchestration models to choreography models and cost-effective development are of paramount importance. Consequently, top-down approaches that automatically translate choreography models into orchestration models have been proposed. By now, the realization of QoS attributes has not yet received the necessary attention that makes such approaches suitable for B2Bi. In this paper, we describe a proof-of-concept implementation of a translation of ebBP choreographies into WS-BPEL orchestrations that respects B2Bi relevant QoS attributes