VE Architect-Driven Service-Oriented Business Network Process Realization

Abstract

Business opportunities are not permanent. Enterprises to instantly meet them collaborate with each other through realizing business network processes (BNP) in which their activities are done with various partners within a network. Recently, these business network processes are enabled with Service-Oriented technologies, that we call them Service-Oriented Business Network Process (SOBNP). In today's dynamic and changing environment Virtual Enterprise (VE) architects require a flexible framework through which they could design and realize SOBNP instantly. In this theme, there exist a number of frameworks that constitute the SOBNP, but they almost neglect two salient issues: a) Covering and incorporating high-level (i.e. business level) and low-level (i.e. technical level) requirement in business process creation; b) Adjusting to the VE architect without deep knowledge of computer science. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to propose a framework and related tools and techniques to constitute SOBNP, as a main building block of Instant Virtual Enterprise (IVE), which address two above-mentioned issues. The framework namely SOBNP Realization consists of three phases including requirements specification, ontology-based partner search and selection, and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) process synthesis. A prototype system is implemented to demonstrate the concept of VE architect-driven SOBNP realization in IVE.

Keywords

• semi-automatic realization of business network process
• service-oriented business network process
• ontology-based partner selection
• instant virtual enterprise
• bpel process