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Astract: Despite standardization efforts the seamless exchange of business documents often poses a problem, due to a large number of different formats. Also, there may be several standards initiatives in the same business domain, all equally important. Consequently, transformation between various document formats on the instance layer becomes necessary. To ease the implementation of transformers we propose an XSLT-based generation framework that allows for bidirectional transformations. Furthermore, we rely on Core Components as an intermediary format. As a proof of concept we developed a prototype based on the open source tool named VIENNA Add-In.

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Astract: The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Commerce provides a conceptual approach named Core Components for defining business document models based on reusable building blocks. For the application in concrete business scenarios, these building blocks need customizing, resulting in different variants of business document models. In previous work we have proven the application of concepts from Model-Driven Product Line Engineering to manage the resulting business document model variants. However, due to the highly dynamic environment of electronic commerce with ever-changing market requirements, business document models evolve over time. This adds another dimension of variability to the problem domain leading to complex evolution scenarios. In this paper, we define evolution patterns for capturing the different types of evolution present in the context of business document model variants. Having such patterns at hand, makes the different types of evolution in business document models more tangible.

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Astract: United Nation's Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) is an e-business standardization body known for its work on UN/EDIFACT and ebXML. One of its on-going work items is the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) for modeling global choreographies of B2B scenarios. The work on UMM started in 1998 and has improved since then by contributions from participating organizations, such as RosettaNet, SWIFT, GS 1. Today, all new UN/CEFACT standards for data exchange scenarios must be backed up by a corresponding UMM model. In this paper, we revisit the UMM version 1.0 that is defined as a UML 1.4 profile. We introduce the main concepts of UMM and elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses of UMM 1.0. Being the editorial team of UMM, we have made improvements to UMM, which will be released shortly as a new standard version. Thus, we elaborate on the new concepts of UMM 2.0 that are further illustrated by means of a simple example.

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Astract: Ever faster changing market conditions require businesses to frequently adapt their business processes and the underlying workflow systems. Serviceoriented architectures are said to deliver this flexibility by loose coupling. In this chapter we provide a survey on realizing flexible workflows on top of service oriented architectures.We show how orchestrations and choreographies may be implemented by state-of-the-art web services technology. The role of agents in realizing workflows among services is discussed. Furthermore, we discuss service provision in dynamic environments, when partners are dynamically bound to the workflow and when changes to the workflow schema happen.

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Astract: Adequate IT support for Business-to-Business integration(B2Bi) is indispensable in today´s globalized world. Agreement among personnel from different enterprises as well as distributed computing issues are major challenges to the automation of B2Bi processes. These challenges can be addressed by applying the choreography language ebXML BPSS (ebBP) for declaratively specifying B2Bi processes and using Web services and WS-BPEL as dedicated integration technologies. ebBP Business Transactions (BT) are the primary building block of ebBP choreographies and specify the exchange of up to two business documents in a declarative and technology-agnostic way. Composing BTs within choreographies and realization of QoS raise important requirements for the orchestration layer. This paper investigates these requirements and presents a composable, abstract, flexible and QoS-aware execution model that can be implemented using Web Services and BPEL.