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Visual Interface for Developing Business Collaboration

Business collaboration is about cooperation between organizations by linking their business processes and exchanging messages. Taking the example of ordering goods, it involves checking price, sending order, billing, shipping, etc among a customer, a manufacturing company, and a shipping company. This project will take a collaboration specification (in WS-CDL), and develop GUI interface for designing and specifying interaction protocols for individual parties. In this project, the students will learn the concepts as well as technologies in e-business, web services, and business process management.

Context Aware Configurable Business Process Development

Business process is developed for supporting business services. For example an on-line purchasing service required a business process that provides: login checking, discount calculation, payment checking, shipping, etc. However different users may require different interfaces, may get different treatment in terms of discount, shipping time, etc. We use the term 'context' to represent: location, user profile, the purpose of the business, etc. This project will investigate a way: to specify the context, to link the context to business activities, and to automatically generate business process and user interfaces.

Specifying and Managing Access Policies for Business Collaboration

Business collaboration is about coordinating the flow of information among organizations and linking their business processes. Service Oriented Computing (SOC) has provided a promising architectural and technical support for business collaboration in the fashion of loose coupling and dynamicity. However unique and challenging security issues concerning business collaboration in the context of SOC have arisen because of its dynamic and loosely coupling nature. An important problem is how to specify security policies that are belong to different application domains and integrate them to satisfy the requirements of the collaboration. For example, a patient can give his/her GP access right to his/her medical records, and allows the GP to pass that information only in the emerging situation. In this project will identify different types of collaboration patterns based on which rules for security policy integration are developed. We are particularly interested in types of collaborations and security policies interactions in the domain of health care.

Supporting Reliable Collaborative Business Transactions

Business collaboration is about coordinating the flow of information among organizations and linking their business processes. One important issue here is how to maintain consistency for each partner in the collaboration as well as consistency for the collaboration as a whole during the long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Existing models and protocols by designing static process control can not support the dynamic behavior of business transaction in the complicated collaborative environment. In this project we investigate the possibility to extend the Colored Petri-Net to manage consistency for business transaction. The model should be able to verify and manage consistency in business transaction so that a theoretical basis for describing and managing collaborative business transaction can be developed.