Autor: Hermann Többen

Today’s economic situation can be characterized by increasingly changing demands from the markets to the companies leading to shorter product life-cycles in conjunction with cost-reductions. One of the strategical reactions of the companies is to enforce mutual collaboration. Hence collaborative business processes are the basis to establish such a collaboration on the process layer. The integraton of theses processes nearly in real-time is one today’s peculiar challenges. In the following a concept is described, that enables the dynamic interconnection of collaborative business-processes based upon a knowledge-based EAI.

Collaborative Business in the common sense addresses the tightly coupled, cooperative interworking between different companies on the business process layer. The capability of full-fledged, realtime collaboration is one of the fundaments for the virtual enterprise. Based upon a cooperation with the SAP AG a methodological framework for the collaborative, automated generation of business processes is being developed in the CoBPIA-project. The major goal can be described as the best possible adaption towards rapidly changing market situations, achieved by the processing of a market request and its automated transformation into a business process. The given approached is highly knowledge driven.