Rule-based business collaboration development and management

Business collaboration is about cooperation between organisations by linking their business processes and exchanging messages. Collaborative business process development requires loose coupling between individual business processes so that they can interact freely across the internet; and that the collaboration can be established in a highly dynamic fashion and on-demand basis. Unfortunately, the current web service development and management solutions including the de facto standard Business Process Execution Language for Web Service (WS-BPEL) are too narrowly focused and not capable of addressing the requirements of business collaboration that demand agility and dynamics. To remedy this situation, we advocate an approach in which rules are used to develop and maintain the business collaboration. We first introduce a Business Collaboration Context Framework (BCCF), which provides enterprises with the context required for business collaboration.We then show how enterprises can capture this context via a modelling process. Following these preliminaries, we demonstrate how the modelling endeavour is controlled by rules, and how consistency can be assessed by these rules. Lastly, we demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in the form of a prototype called Icarus.