The PARIS project is placed in the interdisciplinary context of cooperative information systems. In particular, it targets combined aspects of networked businesses and service-oriented, Grid-based computing.

In strategic networks, business processes are decomposed w.r.t. core competencies of participating businesses. These assets are loosely re-integrated w.r.t. requirements of customers and markets. Trust and information-integration between the participants allow restructuring value-chains whenever requirements change. However, each such strategic decision affects the operational level: Interaction procedures between participants change too and operative process-chains have to be re-established. The more dynamic the network gets, the more it relies on a shared IT infrastructure. Meanwhile, Web/Grid Service technologies provide effective means to share functions and operative processes between businesses. Actually, current middleware platforms showcase notable technology support like secure, transactional processes of interoperable functions with shared data models and ontology.

However, gaps remain between current technology and its application for strategic networks. There is one gap between abstraction-levels. The abstractions offered so far (e.g. Web/Grid Services, BPEL process) are too low-level to be efficiently applied by e.g. business process designers. The implementation of business process configurations is comparable to software development. There is another gap between system requirements. Current technologies are very often just prototypes and merely provide ‘toy examples’ that prove their functionality. In most cases, software engineering methodologies are missing that allow developing mission-critical information systems on top.

Consequently, PARIS targets two main research objectives: The first one is to design a high-level abstraction for cross-organisational interaction procedures. This abstraction ought to enable the efficient set up of operational process-chains in dynamic strategic networks. For implementation, Web/Grid Service middleware is to be extended with an additional layer. The second objective is to investigate software engineering techniques for organisational network information systems; i.e. production-level business information systems on top of Web/Grid Service middleware that enforce and control configurations of strategic networks.

To achieve these objectives, the PARIS approach is to apply two classical concepts from software engineering: patterns and framework-architecture. The idea is to use patterns as abstraction for interaction procedures. Subsequently, such interaction patterns are implemented by means of a software framework. The pro of this approach is its origin from mature software technology and thus the potential benefit from a vast body of former work.

Prof. Wolfgang Emmerich

Christian Zirpins

This Marie-Curie-Fellowship is funded through the EU IST Programme under grant MEIF-CT-2005-025239 in the amount of EUR 161,428