Adaptive technologies to address operational complexity in highly configurable value chains

Abstract

Existing B2B infrastructure is primarily focussed on the secure, reliable, and scaleable transfer of information between business partners. The time and effort taken to establish these B2B connections has meant that the resulting business relationships tend to be long-term and rigid in nature. More recently, however, the configurability of the value chain connecting business partners has been seen as a key to competitiveness. There is increasing pressure to establish more transient ad-hoc relationships whereby dynamic decisions can be made to, for instance, exchange one partner with a more competitive alternative or to introduce new trading partners to improve the robustness of an organisations business model. This new dynamic business model introduces considerable complexity both in the need to deal with heterogeneous partner interfaces and the need to support dynamic decision-making. In this paper we explore how semantic web service technology can be combined with policy-based management to infuse adaptivity into existing B2B infrastructure. The discussion focuses on the use of a high performance policy decision engine to deal with operational complexity introduced as a result of dealing with new business partners.