A Conceptual Vision for Automated Business-to-Business Collaboration

By automating business-to-business (B2B) collaboration in a supply chain across several tiers, OEMs 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, maturing and emerging technologies of service-oriented computing are available, e.g., UDDI [7], WSDL [9], SOAP [8], BPEL [13], WS-CDL [14], and so on. However, the B2B collaboration concepts do not support adequately an automated setup, enactment, and post-enactment of a supply chain. This paper investigates open issues for such full automatization based on a collaboration concept that has been developed for the CrossWork project [1] in which case studies with automobile-industry partners were conducted.