Facilitating dynamic business collaboration : part III

• Main Author: Foo, Xuexun.
• Other Authors: Lee Siang Guan, Stephen
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Industrial engineering::Managerial control systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16839
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Increased globalisation has introduced operation complexities and information overload in the daily management of business processes. The ever increasing Web dependency of enterprises has also created the need for a solution for a dynamic formulation and integration of cross-enterprise collaboration business processes (cBPs) using computer systems. From further research, it has been discovered that today’s BPM systems do not have a universal standard and are only capable of representing and automating low level operational business process but not higher level collaborative and strategic business processes. For this reason, this project will look into the formulation of dynamic collaborative business processes via ontologised Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) Planning. To keep the topic of BPM manageable, only 4 areas of collaborative business processes (cBPs), namely, sales and marketing, inventory management, procurement and order management and lastly, logistics and payment were handled in this FYP. The author recognised that all generic cBPs can be represented in 5 main stages: Discovery, Establish Contact, Negotiation, Contract Agreement and Contract Fulfillment and thus, proposed a Modified Essential Collaborative Business Process (MEcBP) framework. With this framework, a list of cBPs gathered from 3 Industry standards: RosettaNet, ebXML and OAGIS, are organised into small manageable size for further processing. A model of collaborative business processes was created and has effectively bridged low level operational tasks to higher level strategic tasks with the concepts of Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning. This model of HTN was eventually ontologised in OWL so that it can be ready for use in current Web-based processing for direct application for webdependent business environments. This OWL, eventually called Business-OWL (BOWL), will also allow future users to merge with other ontologies to create new knowledge. A prototype was used to verify BOWL and has showed positive results. The prototype has demonstrated that BOWL was able to dynamically decompose tasks from high level to low level operational tasks. Further work such as real application testing can be performed in industries to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of BOWL. Thereafter, expansion work on BOWL can II continue by including all tasks (i.e. internal business process) and aspects of business process that were not considered in this project for the automation and full picture of Business Process formulation.