Method and System for Process Brokering and Content Integration for Collaborative Business Process Management

• US 20090024514A1
• Filed: 09/18/2008
• Published: 01/22/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 02/07/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Kumar Bhaskaran, Prabir Nandi, Santhosh Kumaran
• Original Assignee: Kumar Bhaskaran, Prabir Nandi, Santhosh Kumaran
• Inventors: Bhaskaran, Kumar, Nandi, Prabir, Kumaran, Santhosh
• Granted Patent: US 8,655,709 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/37
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/0637 Strategic management or analysis, e.g. setting a goal or target of an organisation; Planning actions based on goals; Analysis or evaluation of effectiveness of goals
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0601 Electronic shopping [e-shopping]
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 40/04 Trading; Exchange, e.g. stocks, commodities, derivatives or currency exchange

Abstract

Process Brokering Services (PBS) are implemented though the concept of Adaptive Documents to facilitate electronic commerce (e-commerce). PBS provides a single point of process control over the various fragmented execution flows and brings together the elements for process integration (views, content, flows) in a unified, scalable architecture on an industry standard platform. The two principal functions of the PBS are brokering of multiple business processes encapsulated in various back-end systems including workflow engines and business applications, and aggregating content from multiple enterprise information systems in the business context and managing the shared access to this based on the roles of the participants. The dynamic services provided by PBS are accessible to clients through the PBS Interface.

Claims

1-15. -15. (canceled)

16. A method for designing a system for process brokering and content aggregation in collaborative e-commerce comprising the steps of:

establishing an information model, an organization model, and a business process model;

from the information model and the business process model, selecting Adaptive Documents (ADOCs) in the system;

from an ADOC linking content aggregated from various data sources to business processes and users causing a variety of applications and interactions of users in a context of a business process modeled by the business process model;

based on business events and prerequisites of the business events, designing ADOC state machines;

based on processing rules associated with the business events, selecting commands that need to be executed as part of state transitions;

when processing rules dictate collaboration with user or software agents in the system, establishing macro flows which are directed graphs that establish relationships between activities that correspond to nodes in the directed graphs; and

defining, using activity controllers, micro flow used to complete the activities that correspond to nodes in the directed graphs, with a state machine modeling behavior of the activity controllers and commands effecting behavior of the activity controllers.

17. The method of claim 16, comprising including a Process Broker Services interface that redirects a business event from a client to an ADOC, and further including an ADOC controller that acts on the business event based on a state of the business event and a content of the business event.

18. The method of claim 17, comprising establishing an ADOC that has a changeable business state which is a state vector that includes a current state of the ADOC controller and a current state of each of the activity controllers.

19. The method of claim 16, including, for each command of the commands, establishing a receiver, including establishing a set of workflow-related receivers.

20. The method of claim 16, including implementing the ADOCs as Container-Managed Enterprise Java Beans.

21. The method of claim 16, including implementing each ADOC through a framework part and a solution part, wherein the framework part persists information including a current state of the ADOC, an owner of the ADOC and a type of the ADOC, and the solution part inherits from the framework part and persists business object references to data objects.