Modelling Collaborative Services for Business and QoS Compliance

Abstract

In recent years, we witnessed a range of innovations in the ¡®service' related technologies, such as Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. Along with the Service Oriented Architecture, companies can wrap their technological product as a service, to collaborate with others. Facing the ever-escalating global competition, such collaboration is crucial. The viability of this paradigm highly depends on the compliance and therefore the trustworthiness of all collaborators. However, it is challenging to achieve trustworthiness in such a dynamic cross-domain environment, as each participator may deceit for individual benefits. As a solution, we have proposed to enforce strong accountability to enhance the trustworthiness. With this accountability, incompliance can always be determined in a provable and undeniable way. In this paper, we extend our work by proposing a novel modeling of the collaborative business process. Based on this modeling, we thoroughly analyze the evidence and proving procedure needed for different types of compliance, and evaluate the extent to which those compliance can be indeed proved. We have implemented a demonstrative system to show its effectiveness in real practice.