A model-driven, agent-based approach for the integration of services into a collaborative business process

In cross-organisational business interactions, the most desirable solution for integrating different partners would suggest to integrate their processes and data on a rather low level. However, the internal processes and interfaces of the participating partners are often pre-existing and have to be taken as given. Furthermore, in cross-organisational scenarios partners are typically very sensitive about their product data and the algorithms that process it. In many cases, private processes are only partially visible and hidden behind public interface descriptions. This imposes restrictions on the possible solutions for the problems which occur when partner processes are integrated. In this paper, we describe a solution which supports rapid prototyping by combining a model-driven framework for cross-organisational business processes with an agent-based approach for flexible process execution. We show how the model-driven approach can be combined with semantic service discovery for flexible service composition.