Business Process Based Integration of Dynamic Collaborative Organizations

Abstract

A virtual breeding environment (IVBE) is an association of enterprises willing to collaborate in a network to provide goods or services, described by business processes. Two major components of the VBE are an e-catalogue of competences and a repository of business process templates specifying the necessary roles that enterprises should play to participate in collaboration networks for providing a specific service. Process templates should be concretised for particular needs and enterprise capabilities. Which enterprises shall participate in and the committed resources have to be decided at moment of template concretisation: once identified the process template for a business opportunity differnt enterprises could collaborate. Specific responsibilities are assigned to enterprises using information from semantically defined capabilities stored in the VBE’s e-catalogue. This paper describes an approach for template process definition and concretisation in a simple way; thus enterprises could be assigned to participate in a business process when their capabilities and availability of resources are found to be the most appropriate. The capabilities of a tool implemented to perform process template concretization is described.