In today’s business scenarios, companies increasingly join forces to combine their services and products to provide added-value products to the market. These products are typically realized by business processes, which in many cases take advantage of the existing software infrastructures of the participating companies. Because business-to-business collaborations are quite complex, and any failure in the collaboration might have an immediate effect on the operational business of the company, the cooperation between companies should be designed very carefully. Process choreographies can be used for this endeavor.
Business environment
The requirements of process choreography development depend on the number of interacting partners and the desired level of automation. In business environments, where the cooperation of business partners is realized through traditional means like fax messages being sent and read and understood by humans, where humans can pick up the phone and settle any ambiguities, detailed and formal process choreographies are not essential.
Business partner
However, if the cooperation is to be realized—at least in part—by information systems, so that a high level of automation is achieved, there need to be unambiguous models that specify in detail the nature of the collaboration of business partners in the context of a process choreography. These considerations are illustrated by an example.
Consider a bidding scenario in which the owner of a car uses an auctioning service to sell his car to the highest bidder. Potentially, thousands of people can participate in the auction and place their bids. Such scenarios require agreement on how the participants need to interact with each other in order to avoid problems that could appear as the result of wrong interaction.
