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Inter-enterprise collaborative business process management | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Inter-enterprise collaborative business process management


Abstract:

Conventional workflow systems are primarily designed for intra-enterprise process management, and they are hardly used to handle processes with tasks and data separated b...Show More

Abstract:

Conventional workflow systems are primarily designed for intra-enterprise process management, and they are hardly used to handle processes with tasks and data separated by enterprise boundaries, for reasons such as security, privacy, sharability, firewalls, etc. Further, the cooperation of multiple enterprises is often based on peer-to-peer interactions rather than centralized coordination. As a result, the conventional centralized process management architecture does not fit into the picture of inter-enterprise business-to-business e-commerce. We have developed a Collaborative Process Manager (CPM) to support decentralized, peer-to-peer process management for inter-enterprise collaboration at the business process level. A collaborative process is not handled by a centralized workflow engine, but by multiple CPMs, each representing a player in the business process. Each CPM is used to schedule, dispatch and control the tasks of the process that the player is responsible for, and the CPMs interoperate through an inter-CPM messaging protocol. We have implemented CPM and embedded it into a dynamic software agent architecture, E-Carry, that we developed at HP Labs, to elevate multi-agent cooperation from the conversation level to the process level for mediating e-commerce applications.
Date of Conference: 02-06 April 2001
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 07 August 2002
Print ISBN:0-7695-1001-9
Print ISSN: 1063-6382
Conference Location: Heidelberg, Germany

1. Introduction

E-Commerce applications operate in a distributed environment involving multiple parties with dynamic availability, and a large number of heterogeneous information sources with evolving contents. A business partnership is often created dynamically and maintained only for the required duration such as a single transaction. E-commerce activities typically rely on business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) interoperation at the business process level. The automation of these activities represents both challenges and opportunities for supporting inter-enterprise business process management.

References

References is not available for this document.