Selection of Business Partners in Process Choreographies:

The modelling of organizational aspects in business process management
can be extended to business partners, which is important in the context of
business-to-business processes.
Consider a business process choreography with multiple business partners,
each of which plays a specific role in the choreography. If there is a role Shipper
specified according to the requirements for shipping goods, it can be bound to
specific enterprises that can perform the work. Additional flexibility is gained
because the organizations participating in a choreography are not hardwired,
but represented at the model level.
There are different options for selecting a particular shipper. The selection
can be done before a particular process instance starts. This alternative is
useful if sufficient information on the goods to be shipped is available before
the process starts.
In scenarios where only during run time of the process instance are the
goods and the sender and receiver determined, the dynamic selection of a
shipper is useful. Based on the information on the shipment and on its additional
properties�such as dangerous goods�an appropriate shipper can be
selected at run time.
Before the process choreography can be realized, the broker requires information
on the suppliers available. This information is gathered by the broker in a
separate process choreography, whose message flow is not shown in the figure.
The process choreography starts with the creating of an order by the customer.
Then, the customer sends a Request Supplier Info message to the broker.
The broker receives this message and uses local information to find the
supplier most suitable for fulfilling the order. In the Send Supplier Info message,
the broker informs the customer about this supplier.
The customer receives this message and uses the information received to
send an order to the selected supplier, Supplier-A in this case. When the
supplier has processed the order, the supplier sends the goods to the customer,
and the process completes.
In the example shown, the selection is performed using a third party, the
broker. While this is a valid option in scenarios where a broker has rich information
on a set of business partners, the selection can also be done locally,
i.e., without the involvement of a third party.
In this case, the actual selection can be performed as a manual activity,
using information on suppliers available and capable of fulfilling the order.
Role resolution in this case is not performed by the business process management
system, but by a knowledge worker. This task also matches the
service-oriented approach, where a service requestor (the knowledge worker)
uses the broker to select from among a set of services (supplier services) the
one that is suited best for the task at hand.