|
Abstract : |
Abstract | Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are businesses providing services and products that rely on the resources of multiple enterprises. VEs can achieve their business objectives only through e ective collaboration between the autonomous enterprises that comprise them. In this paper we advocate the position that e ective multi-enterprise collaboration can be achieved by integrating the business processes of the participant enterprises, and by managing the resulting multi-enterprise (business) processes. Akey requirement for this is developing multi-enterprise processes that explicitly capture and manage the functional and contractual relationships between the enterprises in a VE. In particular, this includes the inter-enterprise services each enterprise in a VE provides to others as needed to realize multi-enterprise processes. Current process management technology does not deal with the heterogeneity and autonomy oftheprocesses that need to be integrated in a multi-enterprise process. In addition, existing solutions that combine services and multi-enterprise processes either lead to speci cation explosion or disallow conversations between process activities and services. The Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI) addresses these problems by extending an advanced work ow model with a comprehensive set of service management primitives. These include service interfaces, service activities, primitives for coordinating service activities, service wrapper processes, as well as, |
