Dynamic Business Process Support in a Web Service Environment

Keywords: Peer-to-Peer Computing, P2P, Business Process

Closer collaboration among enterprises during the entire lifecycle of a product is a growing trend in the global market. This trend leads to a transformation of traditional businesses into networked organisations that are prepared to interact with other organisations dynamically on a demand driven basis. New collaboration concepts such as the formation of virtual organisations are interesting options particularly for small and medium sized enterprises. These concepts allow to provide service offerings in a collaborative manner, possibly together with larger enterprises in a new market environment.

The Service-Oriented Architecture and especially its realization in the Web Service standards such as WSDL, SOAP and UDDI are a common basis for enabling the networked collaboration among different enterprises. A steadily growing number of business processes are exposed as (compositions of) web services that may be used by closely linked business partners as well as newly acquired customers.

During the past few years, the paradigm of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has seen a widespread interest after its somewhat rough start as the latest Internet (r)evolution that enabled file sharing on a new scale. P2P networks and algorithms offer possibilities to dynamically scale from a relatively small to a huge number of connected nodes, as well as inherent abilities to cope with sporadic or systematic node failures without resulting in a failure of the entire system.

In cooperation with the Corporate Research division of Siemens AG, Munich, we currently investigate applications of P2P technologies for networked enterprises in this project. We especially focus on service-oriented, resilient and adaptive middleware technologies for the execution and monitoring of cross-organizational business processes as well as the management of business objects involved in enterprise collaborations (documents, services, processes).

Funding: Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, München

Contact: Thomas Friese