Rule-Based Service Oriented Business Network Process Realization in Dynamic Virtual Enterprises

Rapidly changing business atmosphere and turbulent market conditions cause enterprises to collaborate with each other to accomplish business opportunities. Meanwhile, dynamic virtual enterprise (DVE) as a response for agile collaboration of various enterprises is under focus of both academia and practice for years. The dream of highly dynamic VEs comes true with the aim of semi-automatic realization of DVE´s Business Network Processes (BNPs). This paper is to propose a framework and related tools and techniques to constitute BNP, as a main building block of DVEs. The framework namely Service Oriented Business Network Process (SOBNP) Realization enjoys three salient characteristics: a) it has been adjusted to the end-user (i.e. the process owner) who has no deep knowledge of computer science; b) it utilizes business rules to realize SOBNP semi-automatically; and c) it leverages both syntactic and semantic techniques for efficient partner selection. A simplified example is used upon for better illustrating our approach throughout the paper. Moreover, the article discusses preliminary implementation of prototype system.