Using Variable Communication Technologies for Realizing Business Collaborations

Abstract

In today's business world, enterprises are not only using Web Services for implementing B2Bi. Instead, AS2 for realizing Internet based EDI, ebXML Messaging and even SMTP and FTP are used for exchanging business documents. Harmonizing B2Bi communication technology in a way that solely uses Web Services is barely an option for large enterprises as this would result in losing investments in existing IT systems. Moreover, forcing a specific communication technology upon all business partners is neither intended nor realistic in practice. At the same time, existing business document exchanges frequently only implement B2Bi scenarios partly. This paper focuses on a method for composing existing and new business document exchanges without replacing communication technology already in use. First, ebXML BPSS is proposed for describing the choreography of business document exchanges in a technology agnostic way. Second, ebXML CPPA is used to define messaging characteristics at the level of ebBP BusinessTransactions. Third, an integration architecture for performing ebXML BPSS choreographies using BPEL processes that execute each integration partner's message exchanges is proposed. These BPEL processes assume Web service wrappers for reusing the functionality of messaging systems that are responsible for performing the actual business document exchanges and for providing sufficient status information to the caller. Different messaging systems then can be used for incorporating variable communication technologies in business collaborations.

Towards Executing ebBP-Reg B2Bi Choreographies

“…The integration architecture for performing ebBP-Reg choreographies refines the approach of a previous paper [4] that is based on the concept of control processes and reflecting ebBP's modular structure in the organization of integration components.…”

“…At the end, the control processes deliver the result of the BTA to the backend components. Reflecting ebBP's modular structure in the organization of control processes can be done by creating a separate pair of control processes for each BTA/BCA of a BC as proposed in [4]. We present the set of interfaces needed for modularizing control processes and specify which messages have to be exchanged via these interfaces for implementing ebBP-Reg choreographies (section 5.2).…”

A Composable, QoS-Aware and Web Services-Based Execution Model for ebXML BPSS Business Transactions

“…A BPEL-based prototype 2 implementation has been used for validating the model. Future work comprises implementing the execution model in the context of an model-driven approach that derives distributed orchestrations from ebBP choreographies as described in [7] as well as validating such a model-driven approach in an industry case study. Further, the applicability of the execution model to other important B2B integration technologies like AS2 and ebMS is to be investigated.…”

“…In [7], a distributed integration architecture for performing ebBP choreographies has been proposed. Its core characteristics are modularization and separation of control flow logic from business logic.…”

Translating shared state based ebXML BPSS models to WS-BPEL

“…While Web services once emerged as a stateless interaction paradigm with poor support for QoS, stateful interactions using BPEL and sufficient support of B2Bi-related QoS is available [39]. In consequence, the combination of ebBP or ebBP-like choreography models and BPEL as orchestration model already has been proposed in literature ( [18], [12], [14], [15], [16], [43]). Until now, the importance of state has not sufficiently been regarded in these tool chains.…”