Dynamic, distributed and open business forces enterprises to support various critical requirements, such as, timely reacting to changes, properly reusing business assets and smoothly collaborating with external partners. Existing approaches focus on mechanisms dealing with heterogeneity, but there is a lack of frameworks enabling legacy business processes performing collaboration in an open service environment. This paper proposes the L2L service framework featuring reactive IoT event messaging and coordinator-based collaborating between autonomous enterprises. Along with the emerging of coordinators, L2L empowers on-the-fly business process collaboration with dynamic changes. We present our experiments with a real-world scenario from the shipping industry of China.

1. Lin YE, Biqi ZHU, Chenglong HU, Liang ZHANG
Fudan University, China
lzhang@fudan.edu.cn
On-the-fly Collaboration for
Legacy Business Process Systems
in An Open Service Environment
This study is partially supported by National Key R&D Program of China under grand No. 2017YFB1400604 and UNINET’s BADALING project.
Hong-Linh Truong
Aalto University, Finland
2019-07-05

2. Outline
n Motivation
n The L2L framework
¡ perceives change and propagates events
¡ fosters cross-enterprises collaboration in an
open environment
¡ Supports asset reuse with annotation
n Case study – the SSP problem in shipping
industry
n Conclusion & open issues
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3. Running Example – SSP
7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 3
Normal cases
Cases with
uncertainties
A solution which
gains extra
profits from
uncertainties
SSP

4. Motivation
n Business processes and services are shifted to
dynamic, distributed, and open environment à
Cross-enterprises collaborations heavily rely on
the capability of uncertainty handling
n Actions in open and collaborative spaces can
create new opportunities à e.g. Crossover
services
n As we seek for new profits, legacy assets, e.g.
business process models, should be reconditioned
without IT engineers’ intervention
7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 4

5. Related Work
n Cross-enterprise collaboration
¡ Ontologies-based approaches in a controlled world
¡ Difficulty in open environments
n No commitment （general）
n Autonomy （System of Systems)
n Unforeseen boundary (crossover services)
n Event handling
¡ IoT-enabler within a single enterprise in a large-scale
system
¡ Lack of effective solutions for event propagation across
boundary of enterprises
n Change management
¡ Configurable BPM with limited scenarios
¡ Dynamic modification at process instance level
¡ Fail to meet long-tail change requirements with legacy
business process models
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6. Research Questions
n SCHEME the effective approach
to support collaborations in open
environments
n FLEXIBILITY reaction to changes
or opportunities at runtime
n USABILITY mechanism to
facilitate long-tailed patches to
legacy business processes models
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7. The L2L Framework
n Coordinators for collaborations in open environments
n IoT incorporation for intra- and inter organizations
n Annotation-based patches by non-technicians
7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 7
Autonomous bees
(coordinators) help
flowers (legacy systems)
pollinated (collaboration),
yielding fruits (business values).

8. On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 87/5/19

9. Policy-based Reaction to
Situations with Uncertainties
7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 9
Policies

10. Processes Collaborations
for the SSP Problem
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11. What Bees’ Roles for Citrus
7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 11

12. 7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 12
Another Example for crossover services
Quasi Liner of COSCO
n Praised as “A new business card for COSCO
SHIPPING Bulk Co., Ltd.: the quasi-liner”
Uncertainties
Ostrich
approach
(business
contracts)
Maximizing
service value
with changes
Adaptation
n The Achilles‘ Heel
¡ p -> (1-p) -> (1-p)k ，p<1
n The instant collaboration across
enterprises in an open world does need
synergism of services and IoT

13. Case Study –
Taking Advantage of Changes
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14. Evaluation against the RQs
7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 14
n SCHEME
¡ L2L is an effective approach to support
collaborations in open environment
n FLEXIBILITY
¡ Events from IoT propagate messages intra-
and inter-organizations, which enables smart
decisions for changes and opportunities
n USABILITY
¡ Annotation provides a non-intrusive mechanism
to facilitate long-tailed patches for legacy
business processes models

15. Conclusion
7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 15
n A framework L2L for cross-enterprise
collaboration against environment
uncertainties, including
¡ Coordinators leveraged collaboration scheme in open
environments
¡ Incorporation of IoT and sharing of information
resulted in flexibility for changes and opportunities
¡ The annotation-based patches facilitated long-tailed
functional and/or non-functional constraints by non-
technicians

16. Future work
n More applications to validate that L2L could
make added values for stockholders
n Complex systems with spatiotemporal
constraints
n Smart systems that reactive to situations
n Proactive measures against asynchronous
events or emergent opportunities
n Global validation with multiple local intentions
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17. Thanks
7/5/19 On-the-fly Collaboration for Legacy Business Process Systems in An Open Service Environment 17
Any
Comments & Discussion
are Welcome