Architecture Support for Flexible Business Chain Integration Using Protocol Adaptors

Abstract

Business chains increasingly rely on the dynamic integration of business processes of different partners. The interaction constraints that result from the business processes are captured in business protocols. Since the business protocols of each partner support its own way of working, the business protocols can easily mismatch, which hinders organizations from forming a business chain. Such mismatches can be resolved by protocol adaptors. In this paper, we show how protocol adaptors can be used to enable the flexible formation of business chains. For different types of business chains, we present formation cases that describe which partners are responsible for the construction and operation of protocol adaptors. Next, we present for each formation case an accompanying concrete software architecture that realizes the case. The presented software architectures support the flexible formation of business chains and use protocol adaptation as a key component. We show the feasibility of the approach by discussing a prototype implementation, which we apply to a case study from the healthcare domain.