CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop on Process Integration of Collaborative Enterprises (PINCET)

held at IEEE WETICE'06, Manchester, UK, 26th-28th June 2006

Final program available!

Program (Tuesday June 27, 2006)

Note: the papers will be removed after the conference proceedings are published

Motivation and aim

Enterprises collaborate with other enterprises in networked organizations to deliver a joint service or product. Such collaborations require the business processes of the partner companies to be aligned and integrated with each other, both on a process and data level in a dynamic, ad-hoc fashion.

Traditional business process integration approaches succeeded integrating standardized processes by defining interaction protocols, e.g., using BizTalk, and specifying how messages of the external protocol map to internal processes. However, this way of integrating processes requires either a high degree of standardization of interaction between organizations or a significant lead time.

Business trends such as increasing product and service variability, fast time-to-market, and increasing division of labor along a global supply chain of goods and services make that networked collaborations become ad hoc, dynamic, flexible and adaptive. Furthermore, collaboration moves to high-value functions in corporations. For example,  biotech companies collaborate on drug discovery and development with their equipment makers. Automotive companies outsource design and development of car parts like interiors to ad-hoc networks of small automotive suppliers that coordinate themselves. Semiconductor manufacturers jointly work with their customers on application-specific circuitry design. To support process integration for dynamic, flexible, adaptive and ad-hoc collaborations of this kind, an advanced collaboration infrastructure is needed that goes beyond current state-of-the-art process integration approaches. We need more efficient ways to define the semantics of data being exchanged, properties of interlocked processes, and the establishment of joint process infrastructures and information bases used by collaborators.

A number of emerging approaches and technologies promise to support this dynamic and flexible kind of cross-organizational process integration: Web and Grid services and service-oriented architectures support distributed execution of composite and large services. Advances in contract approaches support the ad hoc definition of business relationships and their legal background. Various XML-related technologies enable flexible data exchange and ontologies are a becoming a common way to establish common semantics. Service providers such as Google, Yahoo and the mobile phone companies provide public directory infrastructure. While this technology basis is promising and yields first results that we experience in our daily work routine, we still have some way to go to achieve easy ad-hoc integration of cross-organizational collaborative processes.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to promote an active exchange on current problems and solutions in the area of advanced process integration for cross-organizational collaborations. We want to assess the current state of dynamic and ad-hoc process integration, achievements and gaps, and enable participants to ponder opportunities to collaborate and to assess future research directions.

Topics

The workshop address and invites contributions on technologies and infrastructures for advanced process integration, the application of more generic technologies for this purpose, as well as analysis of requirements, potential, and impact.

Topics of the workshop include (but are not limited to):

• Ad-hoc establishment of process-based collaborations

• Self-describing data and ontologies for process-based collaborations

• Repository and context integration for process-based collaborations

• Ad-hoc customization of service processes

• Cross-organizational workflow management

• Service-oriented technologies for process integration

• Electronic contracts for process integration

• Ontology development in dynamic and ad-hoc process-based collaborations

• Process-oriented enabling infrastructures for business networks

• Technologies supporting process integration for dynamic and agile collaborations

• Technologies supporting process interoperability

• Light-weight and LAMP-based technologies for process integration

• Process integration service providers

• E-business technologies

Important Dates

Submission Guidelines

Papers should contain original contributions in English, not published or submitted elsewhere, and should refer to related state-of-the-art work. Submissions should not exceed six (6) pages in length (including all tables, figures, and references) and should be in IEEE Proceedings Format (LaTeX formatting macros, Word format)which is singlespaced, two columns, 10pt Times/Roman font.

Papers should be submitted in PDF or PS format to Rik Eshuis <h.eshuis@tm.tue.nl> by February 24. Each paper will receive at least three anonymous peer reviews. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the workshop. The accepted papers will be published in the post-conference proceedings (to be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press).

Chairs

Rik Eshuis, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Heiko Ludwig, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Programme Committee

Arne Berre, SINTEF, Norway

Claudio Bartolini, HP Labs, USA

Antonio Brogi, University of Pisa, Italy

Chris Bussler, Cisco Systems, USA

Fabio Casati, HP Labs, USA
Theo Dimitrakos, BT Security Research, UK

Marlon Dumas, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Schahram Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Johann Eder, University of Vienna, Austria

Dieter Fensel, DERI, Austria

Paul Grefen, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands

Patrick Hung, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada

Rania Khalaf, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Kamal Karlapalem, International Institute of Information Technology, India

Michael Maximilien, IBM Almaden Research Center, USA

Massimo Mecella, Universita di Roma 'La Sapienza', Italy

Michael zur Muehlen, Stevens Institute of Technology, USA

Charles Petrie, Stanford University, USA
Rainer Ruggaber, SAP Research, Germany

Wasim Sadiq, SAP Research, Australia

Iain Stalker, University of Manchester, UK

Georg Weichhart, Profactor Produktionsforschungs GmbH, Austria

Johann Ulrich Zimmermann, DaimlerChrysler Research & Technology, Germany