BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL WORKFLOWS FOR E-BUSINESS

IN A VIRTUAL CLUSTER OF ISPS

Jane Hall and Klaus-Peter Eckert

Fraunhofer FOKUS, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 31, 10589 Berlin, Germany

Keywords: Workflow technologies, e-Business, virtual organization, ISPs.

Abstract: Although workflow technologies have existed for some time, their true potential is only now being unlocked

with the emergence of Web services technology and XML in conjunction with expanding Internet use.

There has been extensive support for Web services and the standards have matured sufficiently for

widespread adoption, replacing proprietary standards for interfaces and data that hindered the integration

and automation of business processes, especially between partners wanting to cooperate in a virtual

organization. This paper discusses the application of workflow technologies in supporting the e-Business of

small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) collaborating in a virtual cluster. Not only business processes but

also innovative technical processes are being executed as workflows in the marketing, deployment and

operation of tailored ISP services. A scenario depicts the actual processes used and illustrates how the

software being developed supports e-Business for ISPs collaborating in a virtual cluster.

1 INTRODUCTION

An ISP here is a small firm providing Internet and

communication services to business users,

themselves mainly small and medium enterprises

(SMEs). e-Business is of direct concern to these

ISPs for in the volatile and challenging marketplace

of today it is imperative for them to improve their

efficiency, to reduce their costs and to automate the

selling and provisioning of the services they offer if

they are to survive. For e-Business to be successful,

full advantage must be taken of the technologies

allowing open interoperability and supporting cross-

organizational cooperation.

This paper discusses the use of workflow

technologies to support a virtual cluster of small

ISPs in marketing and delivering services to

customers. The research has involved an

investigation into how workflow technologies could

be used in this context, whether this was a feasible

objective, the challenges and issues involved, and

how a workflow platform could be designed and

implemented to support the objectives. Many of the

issues are generic and applicable to many areas, they

are however discussed in this paper within the

framework of small ISPs collaborating in a virtual

cluster. This paper illustrates some of the main ideas

and issues in developing a workflow support system

for ISP collaboration and in particular highlights an

innovative part of the work by showing how

technical processes that have been carried out

manually by ISPs can be automated using workflow

technologies. Only by using such automated

processes can small ISPs hope to remain competitive

and agile in the marketplace of today and the use of

workflow technologies here can demonstrate their

potential in such applications.

The structure of this paper is as follows. First

some context is given to the rationale behind a

virtual cluster of small ISPs. Then the application of

workflow technologies to support the operation of

the cluster and the collaboration between cluster

partners in marketing and deploying services are

discussed. The workflow techologies selected and

the platform for modeling, specifying and executing

them are presented. The business and technical

workflows developed for running on the platform

are examined. An e-Business scenario is outlined to

show how the VISP software infrastructure is being

used for marketing and deploying composite ISP

services. The work is being carried out within the

European IST project VISP (IST-FP6-027178) and

conclusions are drawn on the experience gained in

the project of utilizing workflow technologies for

ISP e-Business.

307

Hall J. and Eckert K. (2008).

BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL WORKFLOWS FOR E-BUSINESS IN A VIRTUAL CLUSTER OF ISPS.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 307-314

DOI: 10.5220/0001908603070314

 SciTePress

2 RATIONALE FOR A VIRTUAL

CLUSTER OF ISPS

The ISP market is changing rapidly, is quite volatile

and very competitive. A small ISP lacks financial

resources and has few personnel, which means it

cannot cover all areas but does have expertise in

specialized areas. It offers a limited range of services

and so cannot cross-sell additional services to

existing customers. No small ISP on its own can

provide the geographic coverage and the wide range

of specialized services that customers are now

requesting.

Collaboration enables individual business entities

to pool resources and competencies to provide

value-added products and services (Camarinha-

Matos, Afsarmanesh, 2006). The benefits of

collaboration in virtual organizations generally are

relevant also for small ISPs (Kürümlüoglu et al.,

2005). A solution for a small ISP is therefore to form

a virtual cluster with other small ISPs for e-Business

purposes. In this way, a greater variety of services

can be offered as an ISP can integrate its own

services with those of its partners in the cluster,

extend its geographic coverage and become more

visible in the market. As customers are requiring

increasingly specialized services, often for a market

of one, tailored services can be offered by the cluster

to its customers by composing new services from the

different services offered by various cluster partners.

The services offered by ISPs require a long-term

relationship with the customer as they are provided

over months or years. Unlike other forms of virtual

organization (Camarinha et al., 2005), a VISP

cluster is therefore intended to be a long-living

entity, although partners can join and leave. Two

operational modes are envisaged for the cluster. The

Community mode is where each partner owns its

own customers and the cluster is not visible

externally. The partner serves its customers and the

cluster is used dynamically as a pool of services for

subcontracting. In the Virtual Enterprise mode it is

the cluster that is visible to the customer and the

cluster owns the customer relationship, the customer

data and the customer transaction. When a customer

makes an enquiry about a service in this mode it is

sent to one partner, which communicates with the

customer on behalf of the cluster. The cluster is a

federation of independent partners collaborating in a

decentralized manner to conduct e-Business. Each

partner is a separate entity that joins in the

collaboration to the extent that it wishes.

3 WORKFLOW TECHNOLOGIES

Workflow has been defined as “the automation of a

business process” (Workflow Management

Coalition, 1999). Ever since the existence of widely

available computing power, there have been

numerous developments aimed at automating and

streamlining the activities in a business process in

order to improve the efficiency of the organization,

both internally and vis-à-vis other organizations (van

der Aalst et al., 2003).

A major objective of the VISP project is to

develop an innovative software platform enabling a

cluster of small ISPs to collaborate and operate as a

single business entity using workflow technologies

to support the dynamic implementation and

provisioning of tailored services. The provisioning

and operation of ISP services by cooperating cluster

partners requires the introduction not only of

business but also of technical workflows in the

cluster. However, little work has been undertaken on

automating the activities in a technical process and it

was one of the research topics to undertake work

here so that technical processes could also be

automated.

Workflow technologies are being adopted to

provide the software infrastructure required by the

cluster when undertaking e-Business transactions

both with customers and between the partners

themselves. Partners in the cluster can use

collaboration-based process models to describe their

cooperation. A workflow will specify how the

individual roles participate in an end-to-end process.

These processes are modeled as workflows using

formal languages in order to be deployed and

executed on distributed workflow engines.

There has been extensive support for Web

services and the standards have matured sufficiently

for widespread adoption, especially between

partners wanting to cooperate in a value network

(Keen and McDonald, 2000). Integration both within

the enterprise as well as between enterprises is not

only easier but also cheaper. These developments

clearly have an impact on the VISP idea of

cooperating roles in an SME cluster, which requires

technologies that automate processes across

organization boundaries. This availability is a

significant element in making the VISP vision a

reality.

Work that had been undertaken in the area of

workflows, especially between organizations, could

be used as a basis on for the work in VISP for the

ISP service domain. This included projects such as

CrossWork, which was concerned with cross-

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organizational processes in the automotive industry

(http://www.crosswork.info); CrossFlow, which

investigated workflows in dynamically formed

virtual organizations (http://www.crossflow.org);

and Astro, which has been developing tools to

support distributed processes during their lifecycle

(http://astroproject.org).

A top-down approach is being adopted using

workflow technologies. The high-level process can

be recursively decomposed into sub-processes until

the required level of detail is obtained for execution

on a workflow engine. Various modeling languages

were available and an investigation was undertaken

to select those most appropriate for the VISP work

(Eckert et al., 2006). BPMN was adopted as a

modeling language for the high-level business and

technical process modeling (BPMN, 2006). It is a

standard containing a standardized mapping to

BPEL4WS, or BPEL for short (Andrews et al.,

2003), and it was felt that its graphical notation is

more intuitive for non-IT specialists acquainted with

the graphical notation of traditional business

flowcharting notations. Despite the weaknesses and

deficiencies of BPMN (Wohed et al., 2006), it was

available on the market in tools complying with the

standard at the time of language and tool selection

for VISP. The ‘ideal’ solutions were not available

and a pragmatic decision was to select a technology

that seemed to have potential and was suitable for

VISP’s purposes.

The BPMN flows are at a high level and may be

decomposed to several levels of detail but they

remain in BPMN. Mappings from BPMN to BPEL

according to the standard are then undertaken and so

tools are required that not only support the

specification work in a particular language but that

can map to another language and/or import and

export such languages. BPEL also has its strengths

and weaknesses (Wohed et al., 2003), but is in

widespread use for implementing workflows. It was

selected as it met the VISP requirements in the area

of workflow technologies and also because the only

standardized mapping was from BPMN to BPEL.

The tools selected for these languages were also

investigated and selected on the basis of their

suitability for VISP aims in the first phase of the

project as well as their adherence to the standard

specifications of BPMN and BPEL.

In the last year both standards used in VISP have

been significantly improved. OASIS published

version 2 of WS-BPEL (BPEL, 2007) and several

big IT companies proposed an initial submission of

BPMN 2.0 (BPMN, 2008) to OMG. BPMN 2.0 will

comprise standardized mappings to WS-BPEL as

well as to the emerging standards for human

interaction, BPEL4People and WS-HumanTask.

Additionally the submission introduces a

standardized XML-based exchange format for

BPMN models, which was lacking in the previous

version.

During the lifetime of the VISP project, most

vendors of BPEL development and execution tools

have migrated from BPEL 1.1 to WS-BPEL 2.0.

Because the expressiveness of WS-BPEL and the

number of built-in functions increased, it became an

option to use the new version of the language and

supporting tools. In this situation, the mapping chain

has to be extended from BPMN to BPEL 1.1 and

then further to WS-BPEL. Theoretically both

mappings cannot be fully performed automatically.

A mapping from BPMN to BPEL is only possible

for a subset of BPMN models, thus not every valid

BPMN model is “BPEL-valid”. Additionally not

every BPEL process can be mapped to a WS-BPEL

process. Fortunately the selected tool supports a

best-effort mapping that works for most

specifications and requires only minor manual

improvements.

3.1 VISP Workflow Platform

As the VISP project is basing its software

infrastructure on workflow technologies, the

software platform that it is developing will allow the

cluster to specify, model, deploy and execute

workflows that support the operation of the cluster

and the provision of tailored services to customers.

This software platform consists of two major parts.

The Workflow Modelling and Specification

Platform (WfMSP) is designed to support service

and workflow specification, modeling, choreography

and orchestration. The Workflow Execution

Platform (WfEP) executes and controls the

workflows (see Figure 1).

Informal textual descriptions provided by

domain experts and following Cockburn’s style of

writing use cases (Cockburn, 2001) are the primary

input to the WfMSP. They have to be formalized,

first as BPMN models, then as abstract BPEL

skeletons and emerge as an executable workflow

that can be deployed on the WfEP. The workflow

engines are the coordinating point of the WfEP that

are responsible for executing and controlling the

workflows specified by the WfMSP. The WfEP

interfaces either directly or through mediation

devices with partners’ ERPs and with network and

system components.

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Figure 1: The VISP workflow platform.

3.2 VISP Workflows

Workflows are being developed in the VISP project

to support the provisioning and operation of services

offered by the partners in a VISP cluster. Processes

are being specified, modelled, and executed as

workflows of activities in both the business and the

technical domains (see Figure 2).

A set of business workflows is being developed

within the project able to deal with business

processes in a dynamic cluster of partners and

therefore providing for multilateral relationships and

not only for binary relationships. These use standard

processes where available, such as those from the

OAGIS specifications together with their associated

WSDLs (OAGIS, 2008) and are also based on the

use cases produced as part of the requirements work

undertaken within the project.

The technical processes in VISP are those that

interact directly with network elements. Technical

processes cover all technical activities related to the

lifecycle of an ISP service in order to instantiate,

commission, activate, deactivate and decommission

the service. Further administrative activities such as

testing, technical location transfer, suspend and

resume are also being included. The project is

providing formalized workflow specifications of

technical processes that are currently manually

executed in order to be able to process them

automatically in a standardized way, something that

has been possible for business processes but not so

far for technical processes.

The technical processes are categorized in two

groups, the Administrative Technical Processes

(ATPs) and the Toolbox Technical Processes

(TTPs). The ATPs perform all operations required to

support a single ISP service instance lifecycle and to

interface them to the corresponding business

processes. They administer an instance of an ISP

service and are invoked by the business processes.

They can be defined and used without the VISP

system and an adapter to the VISP system has been

developed that maps and forwards all the necessary

information stored in the VISP repositories and

workflow engines to the ATPs and TTPs.

The TTPs act directly on low-level Web services

found in the mediation servers of the various

network elements. They usually contain just one

atomic operation to be performed on one low-level

Web service. They are invoked by the ATPs and are

specific to a service instance type.

The relationship between the business processes,

ATPs and TTPs can be seen in the service instance

lifecycle where business processes are responsible

for handling generic operations on composed

services, or service sets, for example, “instantiate a

service set”. Business processes first invoke the

trading mechanism and determine the cluster partner

that is best suited to provide the “Simple Call

Service” VoIP. Then they invoke ATPs to perform

operations on each of the service instances in the

service set, in this case “instantiate Simple Call

Service”. Each ATP can call directly one or more

TTPs to carry out atomic administrative operations

on service instances.

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Figure 2: Business and technical processes.

Figure 3: Overview of the VISP components.

In this example, the ATP invokes the TTP that

initializes the new user account in the network

infrastructure. The TTPs help to isolate the upper

layers of processes from any changes to the WSDL

description as only the TTPs using the specified

WSDL file need to be changed and not the ATPs

themselves (see Figure 3). The parameters needed to

invoke the TTPs are either stored in the VISP

repositories or can be retrieved from the ISP’s

employees, for example from network engineers,

utilizing the VISP internal worklist management

system.

The technical processes are intended to automate

as much as possible of what network engineers have

been undertaking manually to date. The need to be

efficient and competitive means that small ISPs can

no longer have their scarce human resources tied up

in time-consuming tasks. The VISP project is

therefore taking the technical knowledge of network

engineers, preparing textual specifications of the

steps involved in their work, modeling these steps in

BPMN, mapping this to abstract BPEL, refining to

executable BPEL and then running on the partners’

workflow engines.

Technical processes have not been standardized

and so this work constitutes an innovative aspect of

the project. The intention is to automate where

possible not only the business but also the technical

aspects of provisioning and delivering ISP services.

This can save scarce human expertise for more

complex tasks and thus enable ISPs to be more

competitive and efficient in the marketplace.

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4 REALISING E-BUSINESS WITH

WORKFLOW TECHNOLOGIES

This section introduces the implementation of the

VISP software infrastructure and the specific issues

encountered. Implementation work is being carried

out incrementally, with the first release concerned

with how a simple VoIP service can be sold to a

customer and how a VoIP system already accessible

through Web services can be controlled from the

VISP software infrastructure.

The e-Business scenario comprises the sale and

provisioning of a VoIP service for a customer and it

demonstrates how the various parts of the software

infrastructure are utilized to support this. A

prospective customer enquires about the ‘simple call

service’ VoIP via a cluster communication channel

and a sales representative from one of the partners is

selected to process the customer’s request on behalf

of the cluster. The sales representative checks the

customer in the cluster’s Consumer Directory and if

not already in the repository, registers the customer

there. This requires infrastructure support to search

the Consumer Directory and, if necessary, to update

it with the prospective customer’s details. Business

workflows have been implemented with the

appropriate GUIs to do this.

In order to meet the customer request, the sales

representative checks the VISP cluster Service

Knowledge Base (SKB) for possible solutions and

combinations of services. The SKB contains

technical information about the services in the

cluster and workflows have been developed to add,

delete or modify a service as well as to browse the

SKB. The Market Directory can also be searched to

ascertain which partners are offering which services

and the availability of these services. Once the

component services required to support the VoIP

service for the customer have been selected, the

sales representative groups the services provided by

cluster partners into a candidate service set. A

service set is the result of the composition of the

services into one group and enables the selection and

combination of services, characteristics and values

to be validated. The sales representative stores the

definition of the service set in a personal Service Set

Catalogue and validates it.

The sales representative uses the VISP

workflows to instantiate the service set. Instantiation

is a means of reserving resources so that if the

customer accepts the offer, the service can be

provided to the customer. Instantiation is therefore

based on the confirmation of resource reservations

from partners contributing services to the service set.

If a cluster partner is not able to provide a service of

the service set, an appropriate cluster member is

selected by means of trading mechanisms performed

according to a particular economic model. Trading is

thus part of the service instantiation process and has

a business (quote, contract) as well as a technical

(instantiation) result. Details of the instantiated

service set are stored in the Service Instance Base,

which stores all trading and deployment information

concerning the service instances comprising the

service set. The technical part of the offer can be

transferred to an ERP for a full offer preparation, if

applicable. This can include all contractual terms

and conditions, billing and payment details and SLA

information.

The offer is then made to the customer and

further negotiations may ensue. If the offer is

accepted, the sales representative starts the

commissioning of the service set. Commissioning of

the service set has to be performed according to the

requirements of the offer and in particular its timing.

The resources previously reserved are allocated to

the service set and once commissioning has been

carried out, the service set can be activated on the

date agreed with the customer. Commissioning and

activation of the service set are carried out

automatically with the technical workflows

developed in VISP.

A request for service termination would typically

imply three steps, deactivation, decommissioning

and deinstantiation of the service instance so that its

status becomes ‘historic’. Again, the technical

workflows in the infrastructure carry this out.

An example of a centralized configuration of the

VISP infrastructure for a two partner virtual

enterprise mode is depicted in Figure 4. This

configuration shows two partners A and B with their

sales representatives and administrators. All actors

are using partner-specific front ends that are

connected to a common GUI server running the user

interface to the VISP application that is written in

Orbeon, an open source forms solution using

XForms and Ajax technology. The Orbeon server

can access the VISP repository services running as

Web services on the repository server. Depending on

the mode of the VISP cluster, either partner-specific

repositories and/or global repositories can be

queried. Additionally the Orbeon server invokes the

business workflows running on an activeBPEL

server as Web services.

These workflows invoke ATPs and TTPs

running in the same engine via their WSDL

interfaces. The last component shown in Figure 4 is

the mediation server (MS_1) to the VoIP technical

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Figure 4: The configuration of the VISP infrastructure.

infrastructure that can be accessed by VISP TTPs

and by the ISP network operators via a proprietary

administration interface (Jacinto). In operational

environments, the repository servers and workflow

engines will be replicated and distributed to the

organizational domains of the cluster partners.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The research work of the VISP project has

investigated the feasibility of using workflow

technologies in an e-Business environment of ISPs.

This paper has shown how workflows can support e-

Business in a virtual cluster of small ISPs

collaborating to offer and deliver services to their

customers. A platform is being developed within the

VISP project to model, specify and execute the

business and technical workflows that have been

realized. In assessing the research work, the

following points can be made.

Experiences from the work in the project show

that it is a challenge to extract the knowledge of

experts in a form that is amenable to automation.

The modeling and specification of textual

specifications based on the knowledge of network

engineers therefore has to undergo several

reiterations.

Also, although there is a standardized mapping

from BPMN to BPEL, the fact that BPMN is a

graph-oriented language and BPEL a block-

structured language has meant that conventions had

to be established that were based on experience

within the project as well as on work undertaken

elsewhere (Ouyang, 2008). When using Web service

technology it was also found necessary to agree on

common conventions to ensure their interoperability

and reusability. This comprises agreements on

namespaces, message definitions, and binding styles.

The WS-I Basic Profile was therefore adopted

throughout the project (WSIO, 2004).

A big challenge in VISP is to interface generic

business processes with dynamic technical

processes. During the design time of the VISP

application it is known that for each ISP service,

corresponding ATPs with specific WSDLs have to

be invoked. Unfortunately these WSDLs are

unknown during design time. Thus a dynamic

invocation mechanism has been developed that

generates corresponding SOAP messages from

information stored in the VISP repositories using

XSLT transformations and retrieving endpoint

addresses from the VISP UDDI. Such a dynamic

invocation concept can be reused in every dynamic

SOA environment.

The work in the VISP project is ongoing.

Additional ISP services are being made available for

offer and the trading models used are to be extended.

More work is also required on ERP integration via

OAGIS 9.x WSDL interfaces, and the configuration

of the software needs to be based on a distributed

architecture to replace the centralized one currently

adopted.

Workflows are an interesting and innovative

technology for supporting e-Business in the ISP

domain and the marketing and provisioning of ISP

services. Such technologies are being used

increasingly for both intra- and inter-enterprise

cooperation and ISPs, with their knowledge of

Internet and Web technologies, are well-placed to

use these technologies themselves. The research and

development work within the VISP project has

shown has shown that an infrastructure based on

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workflow technology is feasible and can provide an

effective automated environment allowing small

ISPs to cooperate in offering and delivering services

to customers. In addition, several technical solutions

developed in the project can be transferred to SOA

implementations in different application domains.

Despite the challenges encountered in

implementing the workflow technologies for VISP

objectives, an analysis of the project results to date

show that workflow technologies have potential and

can be used to support a virtual cluster of small ISPs.

The VISP application is therefore being prototyped

and will be further developed for use in a

commercial environment.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was carried out with partial funding from

the EU through the IST project VISP (IST-FP6-

027178). Further information on VISP can be

obtained from http://www.visp-project.org.

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