OBJECTIVE:

To provide monitoring and conformance checking capability for choreographed transactions between business partners.

MOTIVATION:

With the emergence of a number of standards to define business process choreography and new software products supporting these standards, there is a need to provide a monitoring and conformance checking tool to assist in demonstrations and testing of these standards and products. Some of the requirements considered for this capability include the following:

• Abillity to read Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) and Collaboration Protocol Agreement (CPA) instances, as defined in ebXML. BPSS and CPA are specifications that have been of interest to a number of manufacturing organizations and, hence, the initial interest in supporting these choreography specifications.
• Work in conjuction with the interoperability testing software. In practice, the monitoring tool is but a part of a larger interoperability testing framework.
• Work as a web based application. Since the monitor is used in the context of multiparty collaboration using Web-based infrastructure, it is necessary for it to be a Web-based application itself.
• Check the choreography. The monitoring tool checks whether each message has the right sender and receiver and that they come in the right order.
• Check time constraints. Each transaction may have a time constraint associated for its execution. Should the constraints be exceeded, the monitoring tool should give a message that the collaboration has failed.
• Illustrate interaction graphically. The monitoring tool should graphically illustrate the business transactions.

APPROACH:

The monitoring tool takes the BPSS and CPA instances as input and produces a graphical presentation of the collaboration as an output. The monitoring tool is implemented as a Java applet which enables web browsers to execute it. The figure shows its graphical user interface.

DELIVERABLES:

This activity has produced a working business process monitoring Web application.

STATUS:

This collaborative MSID activity started on 10/01/2001 and is on-going.