Internet Based Inter-Business Process Management: A Federated Approach

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) has been a powerful business to business (BB) process enabler well before the explosion of the Internet. The competitive advantage deriving from this practice is quite clear as EDI had a big impact in the streamlining of administrative processes and business EDP (Electronic Data Processing) in general. The main problem was the cost, deriving especially from networking infrastructure, which prevented small and meddle-size business to access this resource. Thanks to the low-cost connectivity and the popularity reached by the Web in terms of electronic commerce (EC) enabler, a lot of businesses have now the basic infrastructure needed to support BB processes and this is the point from which our work moves. As part of an ongoing project on federated processes, we present the results obtained with RABBIT (Research on Advanced BB Information Technology): an infrastructure for the definition and enactment of federated distributed processes. The architecture allows the specification of multiple-organisation process independently from the geographic distribution of the organisations involved while the coupling of a specific compilation technology and execution engines supports the distributed enactment of the process. Basic network-fault tolerance and privacy are supported at process level.