The Role of B2B Protocols in Inter-Enterprise Process Execution

One of the myths of inter-enterprise process execution is that workflow management systems (WFMSs) deployed in enterprises can achieve the collaboration between enterprises across networks and that there is "one process across enterprises". The reality is that important model primitives are missing in WFMSs required to achieve inter-enterprise process collaboration. WFMSs were not designed to deal with executing message protocols across networks. In contrast, business-to-business (B2B) protocols address all the required functionality to exchange messages reliably between enterprises across networks and are not concerned about enterprise internal processes. In that sense, B2B protocols expose the "public" (i. e. externally visible) processes whereby WFMSs implement the "private" (i. e. internal) processes of an enterprise. With this approach many of the inter-enterprise collaboration management requirements can be addressed like public process description, advertisement, discovery, selection, composition, delivery, monitoring and contracts. The contribution of this paper is to introduce an approach to bind public and private processes implemented as B2B protocols and workflow types as well as show an approach of inter-enterprise collaboration management.