Research On The Key Problems Of Cross-Organizational Business Process Collaboration

With the development of society and economy, both people's working and living modes have undergone profound changes, which features globalization of business, collaboration of process, diversity of requirement, fluidity of personnel, and so on. More and more requirements proposed by users have to be implemented through the coordination and collaboration of people or applications from more than one organization. Cross-organizational business process collaboration therefore emerged as required.Through utilizing information technology and business process, cross-organizational business process collaboration enables people or applications from different parts within the same organization or from different organizations to cooperate in an orderly way so as to accomplish a task together. Meanwhile, cross-organizational business process collaboration also contributes to the improvement of organization's ability to deal with changes of users'requirements and the protection of existing IT investment.Within the same organization, business possesses such characteristics as closure, stability and controllability and the management technology of business process is comparatively mature. Cross-organizational business process collaboration, however, is confronted with the following problems:discrepancy of application, autonomy of application, and complexity of collaboration. These problems result in such characteristics of cross-organizational collaboration as open, dynamic, difficult to control and inconstant.1 Discrepancy of ApplicationsEach application plays an important role in its own organization. However, the discrepancy that the applications of different organizations exhibit in such aspects as target of service, business standards, technical basis and operational environment hinders cross-organizational business process collaboration. So how to adopt uniform descriptive method to shield those discrepancies is a great challenge confronting cross-organizational business process collaboration.2 Autonomy of ApplicationApplications from different organizations are autonomous, so it is difficult for cross-organizational collaboration to control the actions of these applications and orient goals for them, including the addition, exit, serviceability of applications. So how to transfer applications in a flexible and dynamic way so as to implement cross-organizational collaboration is also a great challenge confronting cross-organizational business process collaboration.3 Complexity of CollaborationCross-organizational business process collaboration often has to deal with complex requirements of users and coordinate applications from different organizations under complex environment, the process of which is filled with many unpredictable factors.Take social security for instance:organizations related with social security include agencies, medical care, community service and finance. The relationship among these organizations is a loose coupling one in that they are only related on a business level rather than on a management level. The applications of these organizations are diverse, discrepant and autonomous. There are some nation-wide practical problems wanting to be solved in the trade of social security, such as nation-wide services of labor employment, cross-organizational services which deal with transference and continuation of social security documents, services concerning transference of medical care documents and inter-region payment, socialized management of retired people and services of inter-region residence. Since these services in need of cross-organizational collaboration are mostly accomplished by hand, it is far from satisfying the requirements of vast social members.So it has become a great challenge in IT field on how to, on the basis of making full use of current existing application software system, eliminate cross-organizational barriers and construct business process according to the requirements so as to achieve seamless integration of cross-organizational applications, community of business data and cooperation in transferring management. Only in this way can we implement cross-organizational business process collaboration and provide all social members with seamless collaboration.To adjust to the changes in people's living and working modes, researchers, on the basis of massive studies, have proposed such new architectures and computing modes as service-oriented architecture (SOA), cross-organizational process management technology, distributed computing. These new architectures and computing modes provide solid theoretical basis and technological support to cross-organizational business process collaboration.With these new architectures and computing modes as basis and business process collaboration as main line, several key problems residing in cross-organizational business process collaboration are studied, and validate its feasibility through the application to social security which has a close bearing on the national economy and the people's livelihood. We are motivated to integrate people and application of each organization and provide vast social members with efficient, transparent, interconnected services, so as to ensure the better services information technology provides to people and their livelihood.The following are the main contents in this paper: 1 The model for cross-organizational business process collaboration is proposed, which serves as its basic facility.In order to implement cross-organizational business process collaboration, in this paper, the model for cross-organizational business process collaboration is proposed. As the basic facility of cross-organizational business process collaboration, the model proposed is modeled from two aspects, namely, management model and business model. Management model models cross-organizational business process collaboration from the perspective of organization, management and disposal, while business model models cross-organizational business process collaboration from the perspective of implementation of successive mapping from logic model of business process to executable business process. In the management model, cross-organizational business process collaboration adopts distributed framework in multi-management. Cross-organizational business process are categorized into two levels: service peers and management peers. Service peers are responsible for managing the services within an organization and are subject to a management node. A management node is responsible for managing several peers and at the same time, responsible for the communication with other management peers. Service peers and management peers are implemented through installing lightweight software framework on web servers or application servers of each organization. Business model, which centers on virtual service, falls into four levels and three stages of mapping. The functions of each level and mapping are analyzed, and the explicit definitions are given, so as to realize smooth transition from logic model of business process to executable business process.2 Aiming to make full use of existing application of each organization, the application service are studied and then on this basis put forward service convergence based on semantic. In order to make full use of existing software system, the application service is studied. By applying ontology system, complex lower applications are abstracted, which provides cross-organizational business process collaboration with a comparatively simplified and uniform view---Web service. For the purpose of a better accommodation of Web service to cross-organizational business process collaboration, the concept of rewriting of Web service is proposed, that is, on the premise of not changing applications, performing such operations as adding or deleting output parameters of Web service. On the basis of application service, the concept of converging service is proposed, which is a set of Web services which have similar functions but come from different organizations subject to the same management node. The function of converging service lies in the improvement of the efficiency of both virtual service implementation and Web service choice. To implement converging service, a new method to calculate semantic distance based on position distance and attribute distance is put formard. Converging service is therefore implemented with the aid of new semantic distance computing method and clustering algorithm based on graph theory.3 The method to dynamically construct cross-organizational business process is proposed. In the light of the diversity and variability of customers'requirements and uncontrollable characteristics of cross-organizational applications, the dynamic construction of business process is the key technological means to solve application collaboration within and between organizations. The dynamic construction of business process in this paper includes the whole process from individualized customization of business process to implementation of executable business process. This process is able to ensure the gentle mapping and smooth transition from virtual service to Web service. firstly the method to customize individualized business process is proposed and 16 kinds of possibilities (3 main categories) when logic model of business process may be changed are analyzed. Furthermore, on the principle that logic model of business process remains constant, we propose strategies to deal with the cases when changes are permitted. At the same time, verification algorithm of business process after individualized customization is put forward, which can verify the logic model of business process after changes. When individualized customization of business process is accomplished, via virtual service/converging service mapping based on state transition, virtual services in the logic model of business process will, through entity state transition, be gently mapped into converging services with similar semantic functions. And via converging service/virtual service mapping based on multi-QoS constraints, logic model of business processes will finally be transited into executable business process after converging services are chosen to satisfy Web service according to the requirement that business processes must be of optimal QoS among the whole. In the mapping of converging services/Web services, the choosing process based on multi-QoS constraints to the optimization of multi-purposes is proposed. And aiming at such characteristics of QoS index of Web services as discrete and hierarchical, discrete crossover operators and discrete mutation operator are gived, which compensate for the limitation that no discrete variables have be taken into consideration in current research on artificial immune system. Artificial immune system of discrete variable is proposed and detailed simulation experiment is preformed, which proves that artificial immune system of discrete variable is effective in choosing multi-QoS services.4 The characteristics that business process have displayed when operated in cross-organizational environment is analyzed and the cross-organizational executive mode of business process is studied. Cross-organizational business process collaboration is a typical distributed environment. The differences between execution of business processes in distributed environment and that in centralized environment are analyzed. Cross-organizational executive mode of business processes based on partition is thus studied. Via partition algorithm, executable business processes form several partitions and a dependency table of these partitions. Partition transmits between Web services of each service node according to dependency table. The whole process can be smoothly executed as long as each service finishes its work according to partition and dependency table.5 The instance in which we take social security as applying background versifies the problems studied in this paper and the related solutions. Social security is a trade that has a close bearing on the national economy and the people's livelihood, as well as thousands of households, under such background, The key problems in cross-organizational business process collaboration and the related solution are versified. The verifying results prove the feasibility of our proposal.