Integration of a Contract Framework in BP Models

Abstract

To fit economic constraints, enterprises are more and more focused on their own business. This trend involves to renew enterprise organization in order to integrate inter-enterprise partnership. These virtual enterprise organizations require modeling techniques able to take into account inter-enterprise cooperation, flexible and lean enough to be used on “short term” projects and fitting legal constraints as contractual exchanges between enterprises. According to a mid-term point of view, these contracts may include the description of common Business Process (BP) or collaboration rules. Then, each business process enactment may also be related to more specific contracts (orders, invoices...) linked to each enterprise activity. To fit the Virtual Organization requirements, we propose a global architecture coupling BP models and contract frameworks. This architecture is based on the enterprise BP adaptation to fit openness constraints. For this purpose, security requirements are added to the BP specification and the traditional BP organization is split into business transaction. Then generic models describing contractual facilities and the Virtual Organization collaborative organization are set so that BP enactment (including contract enactment) can be developed.