Modeling public business processes with interaction protocols in business-to-business relationships

Abstract

Today, one of the main challenges of the Business-to-Business (B2B) E-Commerce solutions is to improve the business processes that organizations carry out with their suppliers and customers. B2B relationships require the management of public business processes, which span the organizational boundaries and are jointly managed by the organizations. Although Workflow and Web Service Composition approaches have been proposed to model and manage public processes, they present shortcomings to achieve the requirements of autonomy, decentralization, P2P interaction and negotiation. A flexible approach that can achieve these requirements is the use of Interaction Protocols to model and manage public processes. Interaction Protocols allows to model public processes with a high abstraction level, which can be understood by the enterprises, people and systems. In this work we describe the modeling of public processes using interaction protocols. We discuss different aspects for representing interaction protocols in the context of B2B relationships. In addition, we describe several examples of public processes modeled with interaction protocols. These examples of public processes are derived from collaborative models for the supply chain management. Benefits of the interaction protocols for represent public processes in B2B relationships are also identified.