Towards the automatic composition of co-business processes

New developments in service-oriented computing allow the creation of Web services-enabled business processes that can be defined through the composition of a set of existing services. Recently many proposals have emerged along this line, including BPSS, BPML, and BPEL4WS, with little effort spent on the development of systematic methods to effectively support composition of partner business processes that dynamically discover and interact with publicly available business processes at runtime. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a framework for automatically synthesizing the partner business processes, named Co-BP, from the formal description of a target business process, and discusses preliminary work on implementing the proposed ideas by use of XSLT. The proposed framework bases its foundation on the well-known Petri net techniques such as reachability analysis and theory of regions. It is expected that the work presented in this paper can promote the rapid adoption of Web services composition languages by providing an automated tool for facilitating seamless integration of distributed business processes.