Peer-to-peer business processes—conception, construction, tooling

Business processes are a core concept of modern enterprise organization. Mainly, they describe the way a company is working internally and how the added value is generated. But as today's businesses are increasingly working in new forms, such as collaborations, cooperations, alliances etc., the single-enterprise-focused business process concept is hardly suitable. In this paper, we focus on collaborative scenarios where fully independent enterprises co-work in order to generate a common added value. For this application environment, we conceive the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) business processes. We show that this concept requires new ways of model generation, because a traditional modeling by a group of human modellers is hard to realize in such a business environment. This new modeling approach is a module-based, industrial-kind business process construction. In order to investigate the feasibility of the construction method, we developed a software prototype that can perform an automated construction of P2P business processes. We close this paper with technical insights in this prototype to describe how it is working. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. In this paper, we address collaborative scenarios where fully independent enterprises co-work in order to generate a common added value. For this environment, we conceive the concept of peer-to-peer (P2P) business processes. This concept requires new ways of process design, because a traditional handicraft modeling is hard to realize in such an environment. Therefore, we conceive a new design approach, a module-based, industrial-kind business process construction. In order to investigate the feasibility of the construction method, we developed a software prototype that can perform an automated construction of P2P business processes. We close this paper with technical insights into this prototype. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.