Modeling Business Entity State Centric Choreographies

Abstract

In a B2B environment business partners interact with each other by exchanging electronic business documents. The agreements and commitments between the partner require a certain order in the flow of business documents. This flow -commonly known as choreography -often depends on the actual content of a business document. E.g. the next step depends on whether a price was stated in a quote document or not in the step before. These characteristics usually affect the states of a business entity -whether a quote is in state provided or in state refused. The states of a business entity usually define the next steps in the choreography of a collaborative business process. Thus, it is important that the actual business document content and resulting business entity states are unambiguously defined in a global choreography. In this paper we show how the modeling of business entity state centric choreographies may be incorporated into UN/CEFACT's modeling methodology (UMM) -one of the best known approaches to model global choreographies.