A Collaboration Model: A Service Selection Mechanism to Support Companies' Interoperability

The dynamic formation of a consortium, combining the most adequate set of competencies and resources to satisfy the needs of each new situation sounds indeed as a very appealing approach. However, reaching a rapid ‘alignment' among a diverse group of heterogeneous entities is not simple and may require a considerable time to achieve. In this collaborative context, the integration of industrial partners depends strongly on the ability to use a collaborative model to interact efficiently. In this paper, the authors propose a model to tackle this point according to the fact that the partners of the collaboration may change. They propose the development of an approach to achieve a dynamic inter-company collaboration. In this cooperation mode, many companies share their resources, data services and processes. These companies have their own mechanisms and applications, which are heterogeneous. First, the authors define a framework to establish this kind of collaboration. The purpose of this solution is to keep the company architecture and to ask the mediator for playing an intermediary role between companies. Then, the authors propose a service selection mechanism based on the agent technology and on the decision tree paradigm. They present an offline composition service process. Finally, they illustrate their solution with an example of treating an emergency case to show the feasibility of the proposed model.