Managing Public Business Processes in B2B Relationships using B2B Interaction Protocols

PABLO VILLARREAL,; ENRIQUE SALOMONE; OMAR CHIOTTI,

La Paz

Congreso; XXIX Conferencia Latinoamericana de Informática CLEI; 2003

Collaborative business models have been proposed to improve the performance of the organizations in the supply chain management.  They  are  supported  by  Business-to-Business  (B2B)  E-Commerce  relationships  established  between organizations.  These models  require  business  processes  that  span  organizational  boundaries  and  have  to  be  jointly managed by the partner organizations. Furthermore, some collaborative models impose big challenges from the point of view of information systems: enterprise and systems autonomy, decentralized management, peer-to-peer interactions and negotiation  capabilities. Workflow  approaches were  used  to model  interactions  in  the  business process  layer of B2B relationships. However, as we discuss in this paper, they present shortcomings to achieve these requirements. To support collaborative models across B2B relationships, in this paper we present a B2B Interaction Protocol approach to model and manage  interactions between organizations. These  interactions  represent public business processes that partner  organizations  agree  to  achieve  a  goal. The B2B  interaction  protocol  approach  enable  to model  and manage interactions between organizations in a high abstraction level. To do that, a graphical language is presented to model B2B  interaction  protocols,  and  the  architecture  of  an  Interaction  Protocol Manager  System  is  defined. Moreover,  a comparison between workflow approaches and the B2B interaction protocol approach is described.