Business Process Management (Part-2 Business Process Modelling[Chapter V Process Choreographies ] ) Sec D -- By Mathias Weske

Collaboration Scenarios

Having identified the collaboration milestones, collaboration scenarios can be
addressed, as part of the choreography definition phase. In this phase, the
interactions needed to proceed from one milestone to another are specified.
One or several collaboration scenarios show the interactions and their dependencies
that need to occur between two milestones. To this end, interactions
between process participants serve as the building blocks for the resulting
collaboration scenarios.
Scenarios should be kept small, as it is easier to reach agreement on less
complex interaction behaviour. Additional scenario models might be introduced
to deal with special cases and exceptions.
An Auction creation
request initiates the conversation and, if not registered with the auctioning
service yet, the seller needs to be registered. Once the Auction creation confirmation
message is received by the seller, the Auction is set up milestone is
reached.
Notice that the Auction is set up milestone is the final milestone in this collaboration
scenario. Therefore, it is drawn in bold in Figure 5.8. However, this
milestone is an intermediate milestone in the high-level behavioural model, so
that it is drawn with a double border in Figure 5.6.
This example uses control flow patterns to express the relationships between
the interaction models. To this end, the interaction models between
participants can be represented as a specific kind of process, in which the
building blocks are interaction models, rather than business process activities,
as in process orchestrations.
Although scenario models define control flow between interactions, the
concrete message structures have not been addressed yet. Data interoperability
is an important aspect in process choreography projects. Therefore, data
models including possible data transformation rules need to be added. Once
these aspects are defined in sufficient detail, all artefacts are aggregated in
the final process choreography.
While the collaboration scenario depicted in Figure shows the milestones
and the resulting interactions, as well as their dependencies, the interfaces
of the individual participants need to be specified; these specifications
are called behavioural interfaces. A behavioural interface covers the individual
view of one specific participant in the process choreography; the internal
aspects of the own process orchestration, as well as the interactions involving
only other participants, are disregarded.
Behavioural interfaces consider parts of process orchestrations that exhibit externally visible behaviour, for instance, communication activities
and events that represent the sending or receiving of a message.