A Reference Architecture for Dynamic Inter-Organizational Business Process Collaboration

The question of how a service consumer and a service provider should collaborate with each other in a business-to-business (B2B) setting is an ongoing research issue. The concept of electronic eSourcing (eSourcing) has been proposed as an integral concept for the EU research project CrossWork. The properties of eSourcing have been explored, however, the question arises how a service consumer and a service provider need to interact with each other during setup time for establishing an eSourcing configuration. The concept of eSourcing offers more flexibility than other approaches in that respect. Hence, this paper investigates the characteristics of interaction between a service consumer and service provider during setup time for establishing an enactable B2B collaboration. These characteristics are employed to discover interaction patterns in a dop-down way that are specified together with interaction scenarios for the concept of eSourcing. These scenarios constitute the basis for evaluating the design of an eSourcing Reference Architecture (eSRA) that serves as a foundation for the design of e-collaboration setup systems.