Adaptive integration activity management for on demand business process collaboration

Today businesses are interacting and collaborating more often in the context of a business value chain involving a variety of partners to deliver products and services. Business to business (B2B) connectivity, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and general business collaboration processes are becoming more critical in operating and managing efficient enterprises. The required level of inter and intra enterprise integration is generally a large undertaking and involves substantial development and customization efforts. In this paper, we propose an adaptive integration activity management approach based on web services technologies to reduce code changes associated with business process integration in a distributed collaboration environment. Specifically, we present a concept of activity chain to capture non-deterministic process flows as well as deterministic process flows in a uniform manner. Then an Activity Ontology is introduced to capture the integration requirements that include adaptation behaviors, action properties, business rules, and access control policy references. The unique ontology representation and management of the integration activities provides a uniform way to integrate additional internal and external business applications to reduce the need for pre-defined and hard-wired integration methods and to minimize code changes to existing components in an existing business collaboration and integration (B2B/EAI) infrastructure. In addition, a Petri-Net modeling exercise of the proposed integration activity management is performed to help better understand the actual system and improve the system design beforehand.