Facilitating dynamic business collaboration Part II

• Main Author: Lai, Louise
• Other Authors: Lee Siang Guan, Stephen
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Industrial engineering::Supply chain
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/18038
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In today’s dynamic environment, Business-to-Business collaboration is very important to stay competitive. Aberdeen’s 2006 survey reported that 80% of 65 companies stated that emphasis on collaboration has increased over the past three years. The way most companies collaborate is via ‘traditional’ way which is phone and fax but this is not sufficient. There is a progression towards electronically collaborating with trading partners. However, current systems and standards are too rigid and unable to formulate collaborative business processes (cBPs) from high-level strategic business goals to low-level operational tasks. This leads to the motivation of this project which is to realize a platform that is dynamic and able to bridge the gap between high-level goals to low-level tasks and to decompose compound business process tasks into primitive operational tasks based on business goals and planning criteria (e.g. product quantity and price) for direct Web Service (WS) execution. The objective of this project is to facilitate dynamic formulation of inter-organizational business processes by modeling cBPs into an ontology. An analysis of current prominent standards in the industry, namely RosettaNet, ebXML and OAGIS, and an investigation into the suitable modeling methods, which enable the author to translate cBP relationships to programming language, was carried out in this project. Methods of modeling cBPs in this project are Hierarchical Task Network (HTN), which illustrate the hierarchy and sequence of the cBP from start to end. HTN allows the author to visualize decomposition of cBPs extracted from 3 standards. This technique is the intermediate step to the Ontology creation, which describe the relationships of one cBP to another. The rationale behind modeling cBPs as ontology is to represent the knowledge stored in HTN in more web-friendly formats. The project results are mainly HTN and Business-OWL (BOWL) and have been verified using basic buying and selling scenarios in supply chain industry and via a prototype.