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Astract: The United Nations Centre for Trace Facilitation and eBusiness (UN/CEFACT) provides a conceptual approach named Core Components for defining business document types based on generic, reusable building blocks. For facilitating interoperability in Electronic Data Interchange, these reusable building blocks are defined in an all-embracing manner. Accordingly, business partners customize the standard business document types for fitting their needs and requirements, resulting in different business document type variants. However, the approach is missing sufficient mechanisms for managing business document model variants. First, customizing standardized business document types is purely based on a textual specification. Second, the variability present within the Core Component approach lacks an explicit representation. In this paper, we aim at making variability explicit as well as adding a formal aspect to the business document type customization process by employing variability concepts from Product Line Engineering. Furthermore, based on having explicit variability models, business partners are provided with an approach for customizing business document types through configuring variability models.

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Astract: Despite standardization efforts the seamless exchange of business documents often poses a problem, due to a large number of different formats. Also, there may be several standards initiatives in the same business domain, all equally important. Consequently, transformation between various document formats on the instance layer becomes necessary. To ease the implementation of transformers we propose an XSLT-based generation framework that allows for bidirectional transformations. Furthermore, we rely on Core Components as an intermediary format. As a proof of concept we developed a prototype based on the open source tool named VIENNA Add-In.

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Astract: The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Commerce provides a conceptual approach named Core Components for defining business document models based on reusable building blocks. For the application in concrete business scenarios, these building blocks need customizing, resulting in different variants of business document models. In previous work we have proven the application of concepts from Model-Driven Product Line Engineering to manage the resulting business document model variants. However, due to the highly dynamic environment of electronic commerce with ever-changing market requirements, business document models evolve over time. This adds another dimension of variability to the problem domain leading to complex evolution scenarios. In this paper, we define evolution patterns for capturing the different types of evolution present in the context of business document model variants. Having such patterns at hand, makes the different types of evolution in business document models more tangible.

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Astract: Model-Driven Engineering places models as first-class artifacts throughout the software lifecycle requiring the availability of proper transformation languages. Although numerous approaches are available, they lack convenient facilities for supporting debugging and understanding of the transformation logic. This is because execution engines operate on a low level of abstraction, hide the operational semantics of a transformation, scatter metamodels, models, transformation logic, and trace information across different artifacts, and provide limited verification support. To tackle these problems, we propose a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) on top of Colored Petri Nets (CPNs)-called Transformation Nets-for the execution and debugging of model transformations on a high level of abstraction. This formalism makes the afore hidden operational semantics explicit by providing a runtime model in terms of places, transitions and tokens, integrating all artifacts involved into a homogenous view. Moreover, the formal underpinnings of CPNs enable comprehensive verification of model transformations.

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Astract: United Nation's Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) is an e-business standardization body known for its work on UN/EDIFACT and ebXML. One of its on-going work items is the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) for modeling global choreographies of B2B scenarios. The work on UMM started in 1998 and has improved since then by contributions from participating organizations, such as RosettaNet, SWIFT, GS 1. Today, all new UN/CEFACT standards for data exchange scenarios must be backed up by a corresponding UMM model. In this paper, we revisit the UMM version 1.0 that is defined as a UML 1.4 profile. We introduce the main concepts of UMM and elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of UMM 1.0. Being the editorial team of UMM, we have made improvements to UMM, which will be released shortly as a new standard version. Thus, we elaborate on the new concepts of UMM 2.0 that are further illustrated by means of a simple example.

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Astract: Ever faster changing market conditions require businesses to frequently adapt their business processes and the underlying workflow systems. Serviceoriented architectures are said to deliver this flexibility by loose coupling. In this chapter we provide a survey on realizing flexible workflows on top of service oriented architectures.We show how orchestrations and choreographies may be implemented by state-of-the-art web services technology. The role of agents in realizing workflows among services is discussed. Furthermore, we discuss service provision in dynamic environments, when partners are dynamically bound to the workflow and when changes to the workflow schema happen.

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Astract: Adequate IT support for Business-to-Business integration(B2Bi) is indispensable in today´s globalized world. Agreement among personnel from different enterprises as well as distributed computing issues are major challenges to the automation of B2Bi processes. These challenges can be addressed by applying the choreography language ebXML BPSS (ebBP) for declaratively specifying B2Bi processes and using Web services and WS-BPEL as dedicated integration technologies. ebBP Business Transactions (BT) are the primary building block of ebBP choreographies and specify the exchange of up to two business documents in a declarative and technology-agnostic way. Composing BTs within choreographies and realization of QoS raise important requirements for the orchestration layer. This paper investigates these requirements and presents a composable, abstract, flexible and QoS-aware execution model that can be implemented using Web Services and BPEL.

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Astract: In optimistic versioning, multiple developers are allowed to modify an artifact at the same time. On the one hand this approach increases productivity as the development process is never stalled due to locks on an artifact. On the other hand conflicts may arise when it comes to merging the different modifications into one consolidated version. In general, the resolution of such conflicts is not only cumbersome, but also error-prone. Especially if the artifacts under version control are models, little support is provided by standard versioning systems. In this paper we present the enhanced versioning process of the model versioning system AMOR. We show how AMOR is configured in order to obtain a precise conflict report which allows the recommendation of automatically executable resolution patterns. The user of AMOR chooses either one of the recommendations or performs manual resolution. The manual resolution may be in collaboration with other developers and allows to infer new resolution patterns which may be applied in similar situations.

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Astract: During the last decade several approaches have been proposed for easing the burden of writing model transformation rules manually. Among them are Model Transformation By-Demonstration (MTBD) approaches which record actions performed on example models to derive general operations. A current restriction of MTBD is that until now they are only available for in-place transformations, but not for model-to-model (M2M) transformations. In this paper, we extend our MTBD approach, which is designed for in-place transformations, to also support M2M transformations. In particular, we propose to demonstrate each transformation rule by modeling a source model fragment and a corresponding target model fragment. From these example pairs, the applied edit operations are computed which are input for a semi-automatic process for deriving the general transformation rules. For showing the applicability of the approach, we developed an Eclipse-based prototype supporting the generation of ATL code out of EMF-based example models.

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Astract: Model transformations play a key role in the vision of Model-Driven Engineering. Nevertheless, mechanisms like abstraction, variation and composition for specifying and applying reusable model transformations - like urgently needed for resolving recurring structural heterogeneities - are insufficiently supported so far. Therefore, we propose to specify model transformations by a set of pre-defined mapping operators (MOps), each resolving a certain kind of structural heterogeneity. Firstly, these MOps can be used in the context of arbitrary metamodels since they abstract from concrete metamodel types. Secondly, MOps can be tailored to resolve certain structural heterogeneities by means of black-box reuse. Thirdly, based on a systematic set of kernel MOps resolving basic heterogeneities, composite ones can be built in order to deal with more complex scenarios. Finally, an extensible library of MOps is proposed, allowing for automatically executable mapping specifications since every MOp exhibits a clearly defined operational semantics.