1. Eric Dubois, Bertrand Grégoire: Enabling electronic business collaboration: from supply chain
business models towards business transaction development

Supply chain management deals with those processes that coordinate the flow of goods, financial resources and information among a network of business partners to create value for their customers. A main objective in supply chain management research is to maximize value creation and efficiency while minimizing costs. The latter involves cost-effective integration of each party’s business activities, which relies on information sharing, common coordination and planning processes. Several challenges must be addressed to enable electronic business collaboration:

• On a conceptual level, the common planning and coordination of business activities presupposes that all parties involved have the same understanding of the business model. They need to agree on which customers they will address and understand their respective needs. They need to have a common view on the products and services they produce to meet those needs, and they need to clarify who adds what to the value creation and what each party expects in return.

• On an operational level, the business processes of each partner in the supply chain must be aligned with those of its suppliers, intermediaries and customers. This involves a fairly detailed conception of the ideal flow of goods, financial resources and information between the supply chain parties throughout the value creation process. The question that must be answered in this phase is “how do we organize ourselves in terms of our value creation activities, the information exchange needed to support them and the rules that help us coordinate and manage our collaboration?”

While the first level of collaboration focuses on whether what we do is the right thing and that every actor involved understands and buys into the business idea, the second challenge is about doing things right, that is, to structure and organize the business activities of each actor in a way that we achieve our common goals, i.e. to produce a maximum of value for our customers while keeping costs as low as possible. In order for us to deal with both of these levels of collaboration and to keep them in coherence, a necessary prerequisite is to consider the whole value creation process (end-to-end transactions) as opposed to a standard B2B scenario that takes the viewpoint.

This tutorial presents the audience with an integrated method to design and validate end-to-end B2B transactions complying with ebXML standards. Starting with a description of the business model that gives rise to business collaboration, the audience is presented a systematic approach to develop a sound and integrated business transaction.

2. Vladimir Tosic, Patrick Hung: Contract-Based QoS Monitoring and Control of XML Web Services

A Web Service Description Language (WSDL) document describes the XML Web service interface, i.e., what operations the XML Web service supports, what protocols it uses, and how the exchanged data should be packed. However, as the number of XML Web Services that offer similar functionality increases in the global market, their additional characteristics, such as offered Quality of Service (QoS), Cost of Service (CoS, i.e., price), price/performance ratio, security/privacy, and manageability will become the main competitive advantages. In many cases, XML Web services will provide the same or very similar capabilities (e.g., WSDL operations), but with different QoS and price. Potential QoS attributes of an XML Web service include response time, throughput, availability, reliability, scalability, security, privacy, and many others. Management (monitoring and control) of XML Web Services and their compositions is needed to ensure regular operation, attain or surpass the guaranteed QoS, accommodate change, and keep track of the consumed resources. In particular, QoS monitoring is used to determine values of measured QoS attributes, while QoS control is used to reactively and/or proactively ensure that the performance is within the desired (guaranteed) boundaries. In order to successfully perform management activities, comprehensive description of what is to be achieved by management is necessary. In particular, such description includes information about what QoS attributes are monitored, where, when, by what entity, as well as the desired (guaranteed) ranges of values and corresponding corrective control actions. Unfortunately, the basic XML Web service technologies do not currently support comprehensive QoS description, monitoring, and control of XML Web services.

This tutorial will introduce the participants to the area of QoS monitoring and control of XML Web services. It will explain the importance of this topic and why the widely used basic XML Web service technologies are not enough. It will then focus on contracts as the most promising approach to comprehensive description and management of XML Web services. A contact is defined as any enforceable and binding formal agreement between two parties. An example of a contract with QoS information is a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This introductory part will be followed by a critical analysis of several research infrastructures, industrial products, and Web service standardization proposals that offer some forms of contract-based QoS management for XML Web services. For example, the tutorial will discus works such as Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA), WS-Agreement, Web Service Offerings Language and Infrastructure (WSOL/WSOI), WS-Policy, and many others. The ongoing standardization efforts, most importantly Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) and Web Services Quality Model (WSQM), will be summarized. At the end, a number of open topics and resources for further study will be identified.

If you have any questions, please contact the CEC'06 and EEE'06 Tutorial Chair::

Martin Bichler
Internet-based Information Systems (IBIS)
Department of Informatics, I18
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
e-mail: bichler "at" in.tum.de