Modeling and Using Business Collaborations

Summary

Business processes interact with each other by sending and receiving messages; how such interactions take place (i.e. in which order and with which timing constraints) has to be defined in advance with a collaboration model, so the parties can be developed separately in conformity with it. With orchestration languages, however, the role of a collaboration model is that of an interface, so it is the run-time responsibility of the activities of the business process to guarantee that messages are exchanged in proper order and time. This paper motivates the need of run-time collaboration instances, which, by keeping the state of ongoing collaborations, relieve business processes of the burden of checking the conformity of the actual operations with the collaboration model.