Modelling collaborative business services

Abstract

Collaborative business services represent the collaboration of business service domains across organisations. This collaboration is characterised by the interdependencies of business activities and business resources between business partners. These interdependencies require information and process sharing within constraints to ensure consistency across organisations. Most approaches for collaborative business service analyses fall into two categories: 1) those based on business-process modelling perspectives using a business process modelling language; 2) those based on collaboration patterns such as network topology or interaction patterns. However, no studies examine the connections between the two categories even though collaboration patterns influence business-process management. In this paper, we investigate the sharing of different aspects of business objects such as data value and behaviours in the context of collaborative services. We formalise this approach with a collaboration framework, and present constraints emerged. To implement the framework, we develop a model of collaborative business services and evaluate its effectiveness.