Web services have a potential to enhance B2B ecommerce over the Internet by allowing companies and organizations to publish their business processes on service directories where potential trading partners can find them. This can give rise to new business paradigms based on ad-hoc trading relations as companies, particularly small to medium scale, can cheaply and flexibly enter into fruitful contracts, e.g., through subcontracting from big companies by simply publishing their business processes and the services they offer. More business process support by the web service infrastructure is however needed before such a paradigm change can materialize. A service for searching and matchmaking of business processes does not yet exist in the current infrastructure. We believe that such a service is needed and will enable companies and organizations to be able to establish ad-hoc business relations without relying on manually negotiated interorganizational workflows. This paper gives a formal semantics to business process matchmaking based on finite state automata extended by logical expressions associated to states.
Complex services are composed of simple services which typically need to be processed in a particular order. Two complex services only match if they agree on both, their simple services and their processing order. This matching semantics can be formalized by means of modelling complex services as finite state automata (FSAs), and analysing the intersection of the FSAs. However, computing the intersection of FSAs is computationally expensive, and thus does not scale for large service repositories. This paper presents an approach for indexing and matching complex services using an abstraction that transforms the underlying FSA via its grammar into a form that can be indexed using available index mechanisms. Evaluation of this approach shows a performance gain of several orders of magnitude as compared to sequential matching.
Enabling technology for realizing ad-hoc business processes currently is becoming more and more popular, like for example web services. Ad-hoc business processes are semantically characterized by a description of the exchanged messages and by the potential message sequences. These semantic meta-data are required to enable efficient and precise searching and finding of potential trading partners. Based on the experience of current web technology, manual maintenance of meta-data is neglected by most editors, therefore the meta-data must be generated automatically. Within this paper, we propose a method to derive a specification of potential message sequences based on a private workflow model. Further, we describe an algorithm for matchmaking of message sequence specifications as part of a search engine for ad-hoc business processes.
Success of Web services mainly depends on the availability of tools facilitating usage of technology within the addressed B2B integration problems. One severe problem in loosely coupled systems is service discovery including a sufficient matchmaking definition. The concept for service discovery in web service architecture is UDDI providing limited querying functionality and not being capable to deal with the multiple dimensions of a service, like for example semantic, workflow, or Quality of Service aspects. The IPSI Process Finder (IPSI-PF) realizes service discovery by extending the capabilities of UDDI by matchmaking of service descriptions. The extension is realized such that an integration of additional extensions can be added quite easily.
The existing service discovery infrastructure with UDDI as the de facto standard, is limited in that it does not support more complex searching based on matching business processes. Two business processes match if they agree on their simple services, their processing order as well as any mandatory or optional requirements for the service. This matching semantics can be formalized by modelling business processes as annotated finite state automata (aFSAs) and deciding emptiness of the intersection aFSA. Computing the intersection of aFSAs and deciding emptiness are computationally expensive, being more than quadratic on the number of states and transitions, thus does not scale for large service repositories. This paper presents an approach for indexing and matching business processes modeled as aFSAs, for the purpose of service discovery. Evaluation of this approach shows a performance gain of several orders of magnitude over sequential matching and a linear complexity with regard to the data set size.
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