Service-oriented architecture for extended business collaboration

This project provides a service-oriented architecture for enabling business process integration and management in business-to-business environments through a uniform business resource description model, integration activity management, and a set of configurable and flexible message exchange patterns.

Businesses are increasingly outsourcing key operations and interacting with ever-extending nets of business partners. Running extended business-to-business (B2B) operations creates the need for integrating more advanced human interaction with the automation base of B2B functions.

From a technical viewpoint, the obstacles go beyond business process representation and data transformation techniques. The problem arises from the fact that companies are dealing with interactions between two or more business entities and their loosely coupled business processes. These business processes could be private business processes in some enterprises or public processes crossing the boundary of multiple enterprises. In this environment, the workflow is non-deterministic and businesses have projects and operations running across multiple companies with a mix of automation and human-driven actions. Timetables, project schedules and response times are equally fluid. Using emerging and evolving standards-based technologies is a key starting point to help address the aforementioned challenges and problems.

In the case of Product Life Cycle Management (PLM), the parties interact in a dynamically established virtual team and enterprise setting, during the concept, design, build or servicing of a product to create a more innovative, profitable, higher quality product brought to market sooner than the parties would have accomplished on their own. By bringing PLM into the ideal Extended Business Collaboration (eBC) setting, IBM moves from ad-hoc and transactional interactions to constructing, activating, tracking and monitoring collaborative development and design processes of a product involving multiple companies or organizations inside one company. An example eBC deployment scenario is illustrated in Figure 1. A product company may engage an ASIC supplier, an electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider, or some other service providers at various stages of product design and development. These partners may, in turn, engage other partners down their value chains. The timing and the infrastructure supporting these interactions vary in terms of frequency, automation, and the individuals who participate in the process. Some partners are connected through B2B software, to support transactional exchanges, while others may connect occasionally through a portal interface. The patterns of active connectivity and their durations and where information is in this design and supply hyper-chain are neither fixed nor static. This is a not a traditionally well-defined supply chain where all participants could be known in advance. Each partner knows and interact on demand with its immediate partners and information gets propagated up and down this hyper-chain.

Several approaches have been proposed to represent business behaviors and a variety of layer models circulate in the business modeling domains. All models, independent of the adopted layering approach, do basically include a higher business layer and a lower information technology (IT) infrastructure layer. Typical business models are: Business-to-Customer (B2C), Application Service Provider (ASP), Application-to-Application (A2A), also called Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and Business-to-Business (B2B). All of these classic models strictly differentiate between intra-enterprise interactions and inter-enterprise interactions. In support of these enterprise-based interaction models, different interaction techniques (business portals, e-mail, fax, etc.) and general and vertical industry standards (EDI, ebXML, RosettaNet, etc.) have emerged over the latter part of the last century providing various levels of business interaction and connectivity deployment.

As outsourcing and on demand operation models are becoming more and more popular, the boundary between enterprises is gradually bypassed or eliminated. IBM Research believes that an Extended Business Collaboration (eBC) that dissolves or rather bypasses this enterprise boundary-based distinction is a factual representation of what is evolving in the business world. This model aims to reduce the artificial elements at the boundary inherent in the enterprise-based interaction models. The diffusion of the boundary and the techniques needed in support of this transformation are illustrated in the convergence trend shown in Figure 2. Introducing business semantic computing techniques, creating pluggable business collaboration protocols, proposing dynamic activity chain representation, and leveraging distributed project and business process management and monitoring capabilities may pave a way to on demand business collaboration, which has a more structured but flexible collaboration adaptability.


In this project, researchers have developed a Web Services Collaboration framework (WS-Collab), a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based extended business collaboration framework that includes a uniform business resources description model, integration activity management and customized solutions for inter-enterprise project management, and integration of design chain and supply chain in value net.

Due to the lack of commonly shared knowledge regarding business semantics, correctly understanding the exchanged information must involve many human-assisted methods, such as phone calls, e-mails and meetings, which make the collaboration processes extremely inefficient and non-cost effective. To lower costs, reduce time-to-market and streamline the collaboration processes, a flexible and uniform annotation representation of various non-structured and ad-hoc information must be defined. The WS-Collab Resource is built on the WS-Resource Framework (WSRF) that provides the flexibility and versatility to support various data formats required in collaboration message flow and document exchanges. IBM Research extends WS-Resource Framework in two aspects: 1. Using WS-Resource to model “virtual” business resources, such as Organization, Project, Process, Task, Requirements, References, and etc; 2. Adding relationships between business resources, which makes this framework more expressive to model complex business scenarios. Existing similar solutions such as ebXML and RosettaNet dictionary are based on fixed knowledge pre-configured at each collaborator side reducing flexibility and functional scalability of collaborative activities.

To reduce code changes associated with business process integration in a distributed collaboration environment, researchers proposed an adaptive integration activity management approach based on Web services. An activity ontology is created to capture the integration requirements that include adaptation behaviors, action properties, business rules, and access control policy references. The unique ontology representation and management of the integration activities provides a uniform way to integrate additional internal and external business applications to reduce the need for pre-defined and hard-wired integration methods and to minimize code changes to existing components in an existing business collaboration and integration (e.g. B2B, EAI) infrastructure.

WS-Collab framework has been successfully used in a collaborative product development project in the Electronics Industry. The framework has been identified to enhance the industry-specific business semantic representations and process choreography aspects. It can help move Web services standards from simple client-server model to solution-level service-to-service collaboration model, which aggregates multiple services as a solution. It has been successfully applied in cross enterprise project management, and the integration between design chain and supply chain. For instance, in a Lightweight EPM Portal Service (LEPS), researchers used a RDF-based ontology to define the relationships among site, organization, projects, tasks, requirements, transactions, and annotations to enable enterprise project management within enterprise or cross-enterprises. The underpinnings of this service-oriented architecture allow LEPS to be a reusable service asset. LEPS portal service can be directly installed on a Web portal to become a lightweight enterprise project management portal. Another usage of LEPS is mainly for solution developers to integrate LEPS with other business applications by using the Web services interfaces for lightweight project management.

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