Towards a formal framework for product level agreements

Abstract

In the European project IMAGINE we address the problem of cross-organisational processes interoperability in dynamic collaboration environments for product detailed design. By dynamicity, we mean that partners can quit the collaboration and be replaced by other partners at run-time. We first propose to capture the objective of the collaboration, that is reaching agreements between the involved partners on the configurations of the final product components. Successfully capturing agreements contributes to minimising the coupling between partners which reduces the impact of changes in the collaboration environment. Then, from the specification of agreements, we generate the cross-organisational process that automates message exchanges between partners. Nevertheless, the fragments of this cross-organisational process can face interoperability issues during run-time. This issue arises because each process fragment belonging to a partner should be generated while upholding business rules of this partner. Accordingly, we propose an automatic mediation approach that is well-adapted for dynamic collaboration environments. We present the implementation and the evaluation of our framework and an industrial case study is followed to illustrate how our framework can be used in practice.