A formal approach for role-based modeling of business collaboration processes

Business collaboration defined as working together to achieve a common goal, is suitably specified in terms of where collaboration takes place (context), those who are involved (contributors), what they do both individually (skills) and collectively (production processes), and finally, what is the expected purpose of this collaboration (business goal). We assume a clear separation between skills and effective contribution to collaboration (i.e role). Technically, a context can the be defined by the set of roles involved, offering a formal basis for reasoning. Considering business collaborative processes, involved contributor’s behaviors set is similar to a software components, possibly abstracted as role i.e services or group of services provided with their production rules. A collaborative context is then viewed as a user-centered service oriented architecture where every stakeholder could be assigned one or more roles. We address the problem of a formal design approach for such business collaboration processes in that context, facing components reuse and process management challenges as unambiguously describing business roles, role composition and dynamic collaborative process management.