Cooperation of processes through message level agreement

Abstract

E-Business is constantly growing as organizations are trying to integrate electronically in order to automate exchange of information and services. To construct inter-organizational processes, the involved enterprises must agree on ways how to invoke process services on the business partner's system. A problem is that existing processes are so diverse in protocols, activity and message forms that it is impossible to start collaboration without comprehensive adaptations. In this paper, we propose a framework for interoperation of processes, which is based on requirements for equivalence of document exchanges. We argue that this level of equivalence is sufficient to enable existing enterprise processes to collaborate without internal redesign. The proposed framework is aimed to facilitate process collaboration by using a mediator layer to perform necessary adaptations, while minimizing requirements for process similarity. © Springer - Verlag 2004.