An integrated reference architectures for supporting dynamic business collaboration

By automating business-to-business (B2B) collaboration in a supply chain across several tiers, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) expect enhanced control over coordinating their suppliers and the latter parties hope to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of their service provisions. For supporting B2B collaboration, different concepts are available. A promising approach for B2B collaboration is the coupling of workflow management with service-oriented technologies. This framework of dynamic interorganizational business process management (DIBPM) offers a new model for addressing the need of organizations for dynamically bringing together a service consumer and a service provider over web-based infrastructures where the service is a business process. Within the framework of DIBPM, the concept of eSourcing focuses on structurally harmonizing on an external level the intra-organizational business processes of a service consuming and one or many service providing organizations into a B2B supply-chain collaboration. Another relevent concept focuses on the establishment, evolvement, and dissolvement of eCommunities in which members engage in B2B collaboration. For all mentioned concepts reference architectures for proof-of-concept applications exist. In this paper we investigate how the respective reference architectures may be integrated for a dynamic business collaboration that comprises the mentioned collaboration concepts.