Keywords:
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.

Keywords:
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.

Keywords:
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.

Keywords:
Astract: The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and eBusiness UN/CEFACT) standardizes business documents for electronic data interchange. Their approaches towards UN/EDIFACT and XML have later been followed by a conceptual modeling approach called Core components (CC). Having used this approach for four years in practice, it became evident that the support for managing business document models is a prerequisite for successfully utilizing CC. This includes handling variants of business document models on the one hand, and managing the evolution of business document models on the other hand. In this paper we propose an approach to face these challenges by the means of Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) in combination with dedicated model management operators. The contribution of the approach is twofold. First, SPLE is successfully applied in a new field enabling us to manage variants of business document models. Second, the model management operators support the evolution of business document model variants, whereas the operators defined, contribute to the evolution of product lines as well.

Keywords:
Astract: Exchanging structured business documents is inevitable for successful collaboration in electronic commerce. A prerequisite, for fostering the interoperability between business partners utilizing different business document standards, is a mapping between different standards. However, the effort involved in creating those mappings is hard to estimate. For example, the complexity of standardized formats is one crucial aspect affecting the effort of the mapping process. Therefore, a notion of complexity is desirable for both, manual as well as automatic mapping processes. For this reason we develop an initial set of metrics, based on well established metrics for XML Schema, allowing to analyze the complexity of business document standards. Having such metrics at hand allows estimating the complexity and hence the mapping effort of a business document standard, prior to the actual mapping process. We demonstrate the complexity metrics on three different business document standards from the electronic commerce domain.