Product-based business processes interoperability

Business Process Modeling languages can be used to specify what data artifacts each stakeholder in a collaborative environment should exchange as well as how he should exchange them (i.e. in sequence, in parallel or mixed). The use of this approach increases the coupling between stakeholders and decreases the flexibility of the collaborative environment. The reason is that stakeholders take into account the specificities of other stakeholders when designing their business processes. This constitutes a major issue in the context of dynamic networks where stakeholders can leave the network and be replaced by new ones. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework that can be used by stakeholders to design, in isolation, interoperable business processes. This framework decreases the coupling between stakeholders while ensuring stakeholders' business processes interoperability as well as a high level of flexibility of the collaborative network.