Business protocol adaptors for flexible business chain formation and enactment

Collaboration in business chains is essential for organizations to be competitive in modern markets. Business chains require the dynamic integration of specialized business activities between partners, using process outsourcing. Dynamic outsourcing of processes enables on-the-fly collaboration of partners through business protocols. Since the business protocols of each partner support its own way of working, the business protocols can easily mismatch. The business protocols are incompatible, and thus the organizations cannot form a business chain. Mismatches can be resolved by using protocol adaptors. A protocol adaptor ensures that the collaboration of two business protocols terminates properly by receiving and reordering a set of messages from a protocol such that the messages are delivered in the order that the other side expects. In this thesis, we present an efficient, automated method to build (if possible) a minimal adaptor for two business protocols, expressed in the BPEL standard, that have a behavioral mismatch. A minimal adaptor processes only those messages that cause the mismatch. Compared to an adaptor that processes all messages, a minimal adaptor has less message overhead and less process complexity. The minimal adaptor is compatible with the business protocols, i.e., it ensures that the messages are communicated in the right order, and thus the protocols can proceed exchanging messages and terminate properly without reaching deadlock. Both the input protocols and the constructed minimal adaptor can contain parallelism and loops. We show that our method for adaptor construction runs in polynomial time. More-over, we identify how protocol adaptation can be used to support the flexible formation of business chains, resolving protocol incompatibilities between partner organizations. For each business chain type, we describe how protocol adaptors can be used to enable flexible formation of such a chain. Next, we present for each flexible chain formation case a supporting software architecture. The software architectures include an adaptor factory component as a key element to support the flexible formation and enactment of business chains. We validate the work of this thesis by a concrete implementation of a software prototype in a case study in the healthcare domain. We show the feasibility of the approach using current technologies and standards, and the limitations of the approach.