=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-404/paper-4
|storemode=property
|title=A holistic Methodology for Model-driven B2B Integration: From Business Values over Business Collaborations to Deployment Artifacts
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-404/Paper3.pdf
|volume=Vol-404
}}
==A holistic Methodology for Model-driven B2B Integration: From Business Values over Business Collaborations to Deployment Artifacts==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-404/Paper3.pdf
A holistic Methodology for model-driven B2B Integration:
From Business Values over Business Collaborations to
Deployment Artifacts
∗
Marco Zapletal
Electronic Commerce Group
Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems
Vienna University of Technology
marco@ec.tuwien.ac.at
ABSTRACT messages electronically in order to reach their business goals and
Business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce based on the prin- gain financial benefits.
ciples of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems has been con-
ducted for a long time. In recent years, we observe a switch to With the advent of the internet, the area of electronic business started
a rather business process-based thinking for implementing inter- to boom. In the field of B2B electronic commerce, small and medium
organizational systems. UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology sized companies now saw their chance to enter electronic markets.
(UMM) - which I co-authored - is considered as one of the mature Now, it seemed possible to find new business partners electroni-
graphical modeling approaches for modeling interorganizational cally and to dynamically conduct e-business. In addition, with the
business processes. However, UMM has still several shortcoming advent of XML, the problems of EDI appeared to be solved all of a
that prevent a throughout model-driven software engineering ap- sudden. However, this was a broad misconception - the pure map-
proach. In this PhD proposal, further contributions to the UMM ping of EDI concepts to brackets did not yield a solution to the
are identified that are required to lift it to an holistic B2B method- shortcomings of traditional EDI.
ology for the development of interorganizational systems. These
contributions will extend the UMM to become an integrated ap- At this time, business process management was already in use to
proach starting with business models, leading over to business col- specify intraorganizational workflows. Enterprises started to adopt
laboration models, and finally resulting in deployable artifacts for business process modeling in order to monitor their procedures and
business service interfaces. The proposed top-down approach is in to design process-based solutions. In the context of EDI, the con-
line with the ideas of model-driven engineering resulting in shorter cept of a business process has already existed - but buried in the
development cycles and reduced complexity. minds of those people that were responsible for the interorganizational
systems. These people were aware, for example, what to do next
when an invoice was received and how to trigger manual compen-
1. MOTIVATION sation if - in case of a failure - a dunning letter was received before
Conducting electronic business between enterprises was not an in- an invoice. They were able to resolve the problem by phoning the
vention of the internet age, but has existed for decades. However, business partner, because their counterpart was known to them. In
requirements of business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce this respect, the notion of a business process - as a protocol for
have changed since that time. In former days, when B2B electronic specifying the course of business - was already there.
commerce was referred to as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), its
focus was document-centric. This means, in order to avoid bilat- However, according to the idea of modern electronic markets where
eral agreements on business documents, business partners agreed companies of almost any size conduct business in a dynamic way,
on business document standards. But, as history has shown, the business partners are not acquainted as described above. Dynamic
results of these standardization efforts were overloaded and am- B2B e-business involves spontaneous agreements, which might ex-
biguous document standards. This led to costly EDI systems and ist just for one economic transaction. There are no offline ne-
participation in electronic business was reserved to large compa- gotiations and no face-to-face relationships. Instead, agreements
nies that were able to afford such implementations. As a conse- are made online, which requires business partners to unambigu-
quence, only circles of acquainted enterprises exchanged business ously define how to conduct business with them. In other words,
∗2nd year PhD student at Vienna University of Technology business partners must describe what business processes they offer
in order to show potential business partners how to interact with
them. It follows, that interorganizational business process models
are the basic building block for flexible and spontaneous B2B e-
commerce.
Figure 1 shows a slightly extended version of the Open-edi refer-
ence model [14]. It separates the development of interorganizational
systems into business and technology concerns. Specifications for
capturing collaborative business logic are covered by the business
operational view (BOV). The functional service view (FSV) com-
Business Models builds upon the Unified Modeling Language (UML), which is con-
sidered as the "lingua franca" in software development and also
Business Process Models BOV widely accepted for business process modeling. UMM is standard-
ized by UN/CEFACT (United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation
Deployment Artifacts FSV and Electronic Business) known for its standardization efforts in
EDIFACT and ebXML.
Figure 1: Refined Open-edi reference model UMM defines a meta model and a development process ranging
from requirements elicitation to business collaboration design. In
previous versions of the UMM - before version 1.0 - there was a
prises technology specifications for implementing business logic. lack of formal correctness of the meta model, which made it im-
In this thesis a holistic approach for B2B integration is developed possible to derive software artifacts from the model according to
starting with business models, leading to business process models, a model-driven software development approach. In addition, the
and finally resulting in deployable artifacts. meta model’s complexity was the reason that applying the UMM
was a tremendous task - oftentimes it resulted in faulty business
Modeling interorganizational business processes is considered as collaboration models. The current version 1.0 of the UMM [22]
the foundation of this approach. Hence, the currently most promis- is a considerable improvement. Nevertheless, UMM is still rather
ing approach for modeling interorganizational systems - accepted in academia than in the industry.
UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Methodology (UMM) - will be the start-
ing point of this thesis. I co-authored UMM 1.0 during my under- The current UMM 1.0 will be the starting point for this thesis. On
graduate studies [15] and was one of the authors of the first book top of UMM, an integrated B2B methodology following three layer
on UMM [23]. Considering figure 1, UMM sits on the business approach will be defined as outlined in the section before. A de-
process layer. The first part of this PhD thesis will concentrate tailed description of current problem fields and the contributions of
on amply improvements of the current UMM version [22]. The this thesis are given in the next section.
second part of this thesis lays focus on integrating value-based re-
quirements engineering in UMM. By integrating business model-
ing, UMM enables to show the economic rationale behind business
3. PROBLEM FIELDS - CONTRIBUTION OF
collaborations. Business models are considered as a layer on top THIS THESIS
of business process models. Finally, this thesis will propose ap- When I started to work on the UMM, it was a so-called "UML
proaches for deriving deployment artifacts for interorganizational profile" but it was not formally specified as one. A UML profile
systems from UMM business collaborations. The resulting ap- customizes UML for a domain-specific purpose by defining a set
proach that spans the three layers depicted in figure 1 corresponds of stereotypes, tagged values and constraints. The versions before
to the overall goal of this thesis - a holistic methodology for B2B UMM 1.0 [22] lacked the definitions of constraints. Hence, there
integration. We already published this three-layered approach in were no unambiguous and formal definitions of UMM modeling
[11]. artifacts as well as which relations between UMM stereotypes are
allowed and which are not.
The remainder of this proposal is structured as follows: Section
2 describes the state of the art in regard to current B2B model- 3.1 Migrating UN/CEFACT’s Modeling Method-
ing approaches. Section 3 elaborates the contribution of this work
by outlining solutions to current shortcoming of the UMM. Each
ology to UML 2
shortcoming as well as the corresponding solution is discussed in The UMM Foundation Module 1.0 is the first UMM version that
its own sub section. Finally, section 4 concludes this proposal. satisfies the formal requirements of a UML profile. When the UMM
1.0 project was started within UN/CEFACT, UML 2.0 was not con-
sidered as stable enough. Hence, UMM is currently built on UML
2. STATE OF THE ART 1.4, but today UML 2 is considered as the state of the art. Conse-
People have learned that traditional EDI concepts do not realize the quently, UMM stakeholders ask for a "UMM 2.0" that is defined on
idea of dynamic e-commerce as envisioned at the beginning of this top of UML 2. In addition, UML 2 provides major improvements
proposal. In this respect, the need for modeling interorganizational to key modeling elements of the UMM (e.g., activity diagrams). It
business processes has become evident. follows that moving UMM to UML 2 is required. Beside the criti-
cism that the current UMM is based on an outdated UML, the meta
Traditionally, business process modeling focused on intraorgani- model of the UMM is still often bashed as too complex (e.g., UMM
zational business processes in order to capture workflows that are 1.0 models often result in excessive package structures). Further-
internal to an enterprise. Internal processes are always modeled more, some workarounds that were necessary in the meta model
from the perspective of the respective company. In a collabora- due to the use of UML 1.4 contribute to often bloated UMM mod-
tive context, however, a partner-specific view on a process is not els.
sufficient. If each participant in a collaborative process describes
its own perspective on the same process in isolation, the resulting For this reason, the initial contribution of this thesis will be a defi-
process descriptions will most likely not match. Thus, modeling nition of UMM on top of UML 2, reflecting experiences and com-
interorganizational processes requires a global perspective. ments from stakeholders. The result is an easier to use UMM that
builds on current standards. This ensures further adoption by po-
Today, several modeling approaches exist for capturing collabora- tential users and fosters the support of tool vendors. The new UMM
tive business processes. Some appropriate approaches have been version serves as the core for the further extensions and improve-
identified in [2]. Amongst these approaches, UN/CEFACT’s Mod- ments suggested throughout this thesis. The use of UML 2 also
eling Methodology (UMM) [22] is the most promising one. UMM eliminates the above mentioned workarounds in the UMM meta
model. In [7] we give an outlook on the migration of UMM to els (or vice versa) necessitates consistency checks between those
UML 2 and [24] covers a detailed presentation of UMM 2.0. artifacts. In [1] the authors propose consistency checks between
e3-Value models and petri nets. [25] outlines an analog approach
Beside UML activity diagrams several other notations and model- for e3-Value and activity diagrams. A similar approach has to be
ing languages emerged in the past to capture process flows. In the researched for UMM and e3-Value.
past, the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) [19] has
gained very much attention from end users and tool vendors. Peo- 3.3 Deriving deployment artifacts from UMM
ple often consider UMM and BPMN as comparable approaches for
modeling interorganizational processes. So when presenting UMM models
2.0 in this thesis, the differences between UMM and the BPMN will According to the idea of model driven software development the
be discussed and it will be shown why BPMN is not sufficient for derivation of deployable artifacts from collaborative business pro-
designing interorganizational processes. cess models is desirable. In the field of Web Services, the Business
Process Execution Language (BPEL) [18] gained a lot of attention
3.2 Introducing value-based requirements en- for implementing business processes. BPEL describes a business
process from a partner-specific view. In contrary, UMM focuses
gineering into UMM on global choreographies. Thus, in order to generate BPEL arti-
Modeling business processes shows how an enterprise acts in or- facts from UMM, global UMM business collaboration models have
der to reach an economic goal. In the context of B2B, the busi- to be mapped to partner-specific BPEL processes. Starting with a
ness process model captures how different enterprises interact to graphical model showing a global perspective provides major ben-
exchange objects of economic value. However, a business pro- efits for three reasons: Firstly, the business collaboration model
cess model does not concentrate on economic reciprocity - what serves as a kind of contract partners agree on. Secondly, the busi-
objects of value are exchanged to gain other objects of value. It is ness collaboration model allows the generation of complementary
the purpose of business models to capture this aspect of economic process specifications for each partner’s interface. This ensures that
transactions. According to Timmer [21] a business model is an ar- the partner interfaces interact according to the global choreography
chitecture for the product, service and information flows, including of the business collaboration. Finally, the generation of such arti-
a description of the various actors and their roles, together with a facts allows quick and cheap customizations of a B2B system to
description of the sources of revenues and potential benefits. In changing business requirements.
other words, a business model captures what economic values are
exchanged between enterprises and collaborative business process There already exists some work in the field of deriving deployment
models describe the interactions required in order to implement the artifacts from business process models. In [6] the authors outline
value exchange. a proof-of-concept approach generating BPEL code from UMM.
This approach was implemented in [16] and its shortcomings are
The current UMM concentrates on specifying business process mod- described in [15]. It does neither map all UMM concepts nor is the
els as well as their requirements, but lacks value-based require- generation of executable artifacts possible. Recently, we published
ments engineering by means of business models. However, it is an an unambiguous mapping from UMM to executable BPEL artifacts
interesting fact for an enterprise to combine these different views [8]. The UMM to BPEL mapping will be another contribution of
on economic transaction. It helps identifying business processes this thesis.
that have to be supported in order to realize a given value exchange.
In addition, it allows monitoring if a deployed business process still Besides the pure Web Services approach, this thesis will also focus
fulfills a given business model. on the implementation of UMM processes using workflow fram-
works. The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is an upcoming
In order to provide value-based requirements engineering in UMM, technology allowing developers to create workflow-centric appli-
this thesis will propose the integration of an e-business modeling cations. The WF approach is not limited to workflows internal to
approach. As identified in [2], currently popular business model- a company, but allows the implementation of interorganizational
ing approaches are e3-Value [4] [3] [5], the Resource-Event-Agent business processes. Similary to the BPEL approach, this thesis will
Methodology (REA) [17] and the Business Model Ontology (BMO) propose a derivation algorithm for generating Windows Workflow
[20]. The work in this thesis will concentrate on e3-Value. In e3- artifacts from UMM business collaboration models.
value, a business model is regarded as a value constellation, i.e., a
network of enterprises that jointly create and distribute objects of
economic value to satisfy a consumer need. Focus is on an eco- 3.4 Managing UMM artifacts within business
nomic value proposition, i.e., expressing the objects of values an registries
actor is willing to exchange for other objects. The model ensures The vision of dynamic B2B presupposes that business partners find
the concept of economic reciprocity, i.e., if an actor delivers an ob- each other electronically based on the descriptions of business pro-
ject of value, he or she gets another object of value in return. Hence, cesses and of the services they need and offer. This idea requires
the model illustrates which actors can have economic transactions that business partners are provided with means to publish as well
with each other on an abstract level, without the internal processes as to consume information related to their business conditions. It
necessary to create these values. follows, that the concept of a business registry is required in or-
der to provide enterprises with a central site for to find each other.
The e3-Value approach currently defines its own notation. A first Such a business registry must be capable of managing UMM arti-
step towards the integration of e3-Value into the UMM is defini- facts. Artifacts might be whole models or just parts thereof. Parts
tion of a UML profile for e3-Value. This contribution has been of a UMM model might be re-used in another interorganizational
published in [13]. Still an issue to address is aligning the e3-Value business process.
concepts with the UMM development process. In addition, speci-
fying that a business model fits to a certain business process mod- In order to solve the issue explained above, this thesis will describe
the representation and management of UMM artifacts within busi- [9] B. Hofreiter, C. Huemer, and M. Zapletal. A Business
ness registries. More specifically, ebXML registries will be the tar- Collaboration Registry Model on Top of ebRIM. In
get platform for managing UMM artifacts. The work in terms of Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on
registering artifacts is made up of two parts: e-Business Engineering (ICEBE’06). IEEE CS, Oct. 2006.
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Firstly, approaches are proposed to store UMM models as a whole Business Collaboration Models in an ebXML Registry. In
or just several parts thereof. Since dependencies might exist be- Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on
tween different parts of a UMM model, the proposed approach will E-Commerce Technology and the 3rd IEEE International
outline how to maintain these relationships in a business registry. Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce, and
We already published this contribution in [10] and [9]. E-Services (CEC/EEE’06). IEEE CS, June 2006.
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