Description

The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them.

Especially, the concept of business transaction still needs clarification and extension in terms of its properties (such as privacy preservation) when the autonomy of transacting partners need to be considered. In this context, the Trusted Business Transactions (TBT) project aims at extending the global architecture by

• a new kind of business transaction model that steps forward from relaxing the traditional ACID transaction properties to freshly define the consistency rules for transactions from the business perspective, including breach detection and recovery aspects, and
• analysis tools for the business processes associated to the transactions so that privacy-preservation properties in the transactions can be determined

The work continues development of B2B middleware for inter-enterprise collaboration management and (semantic, pragmatic) interoperabilty control performed in the CINCO group (Collaborative and Interoperable Computing).

Project facts: