DynaCo 2010 - 1st International Workshop on Dynamic Business-to-Business Collaboration DynaCo'10

Collaboration between organizations is complex from a business, conceptual, and technological point of view. Service consumers may source from service providers for several reasons, e.g., the OEM cannot produce a specified quality, or for a set low price per piece, the production capacity is not available, required special know-how is lacking, and so on. In this situation, collaborating parties want to control how much process detail they expose and which parts of them are observable. While a service provider has to adhere to the requirements agreed with the service consumer, the provider still needs flexibility for extending and adjusting the service provisioning to internal needs that remain opaque to the consumer, e.g., to perform back-office tasks. Moreover, with respect to dynamic B2B collaboration, during the setup phase the question arises based on what criteria business parties find each other and determine the counterpart is trustworthy and reputable. Also, while enacting a B2B collaboration with multiple business parties, it must be clear how to behave if one violates collaboration agreements, how to resolve conflicts, how to re-organize an existing B2B collaboration if needed.

A promising approach for supporting dynamic B2B collaboration combines service-oriented business integration and workflow management over web-based infrastructures to satisfy the need of organizations for dynamically bringing together a service consumer and one or several service providers. The term dynamic means that during process enactment collaborator organizations are found by searching business process marketplaces and the sub-processes are integrated with the running process. Besides the simple way of bringing services together on a name basis, other methods may employ the comparison of attribute values, ontologies realized with semantic web technology, or comparison of service structures. Hence, a need arises to manage the occurring complexity with dedicated serviceoriented artifacts such as architectures, specification languages, collaboration patterns, and so on.

Innovative concepts and technologies of service-oriented computing are a means for automating dynamic B2B collaboration. In order to realize dynamic B2B collaboration, concepts and technologies for a basic infrastructure are necessary to create an e-business service ecosystem. For organizations, such a service ecosystem to manage infrastructure, objects, software, platforms, business processes as a service, poses an opportunity for total customer integration with the help of so-called service hubs that are necessary to manage the potential communication overhead. Hence, hubs within the ecosystem may be used for collecting service proposals from customers, applying mining methods to automatically detect the most promising, inter-organizationally matching and adapting these services for carrying out e-business transactions, versioning existing services, and finally discarding services when they reach the end of their lifecycles. The Workshop on Dynamic B2B Collaboration aims at bringing together contributions to address these complex challenges.