Matchmaking for Business Processes Based on Choreographics

Abstract

Web services have a potential to enhance B2B e-commerce 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, for example 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 article gives a formal semantics to business process matchmaking based on finite state automata extended by logical expressions associated to states.

Workflow Discovery

“…In the workflow research literature, techniques are rare and apparently limited to research prototypes such as Wroe, Stevens, Goble, Roberts, and Greenwood (2003); Wombacher, Fankhauser, Mahleko, and Neuhold (2004);; and Grigori, Corrales, and Bouzeghoub (2006). In Wroe et al (2003), an extensive and rich ontology is built that allows one to look for containing services of workflows.…”

Indexing Business Processes based on Annotated Finite State Automata

“…Figure 1 is a simplified, but illustrative example showing five business processes, which are depicted as annotated finite state automata [14]. The used messages are RosettaNet messages, where i is a purchase order request (PIP3A4), a is a purchase order confirmation (PIP3A4), b is a purchase order cancellation request (PIP3A9) while s and s are used for order status request and response respectively (PIP3A5) [13].…”

“…Annotated finite state automata (aFSAs) are used to describe matchmaking of business processes 1 [14]. Since we do not expect that processes are originally specified as aF-SAs, mappings can be defined from process specification 1 Other workflow models like for example Petri Nets could also have been applied.…”

“…The matchmaking of business processes using aFSAs has been described in [14]. Therefore, only the definition of an aFSA itself is presented here.…”

“…. , A N }, find a subset R of the collection D containing all aFSAs A i with a non-empty intersection with the query aFSA A; thus R := {A i ∈ D|L(A i ) ∩ L(A) = ∅}, where L(A i ) and L(A) are languages of aFSAs A i and A respectively; The detailed description of intersection and emptiness computation (see [14]) are omitted due to lack of space.…”