Being able to implement efficient cross-organizational collaborations has become a key factor for enterprises to respond to emerging market opportunities. The Business Process Management approach is commonly used to design crossorganizational collaborations. This type of business process aims at achieving specific collaborative objectives by addressing three main steps according to a top-down approach: (i)defining the business services that have to be performed to reach the objectives, (ii)finding the best set of partners to provide them and (iii)ordering the business services in an optimized way. While the resulting business processes are a cornerstone to support the interoperability among the partners of a collaboration, their design step remains often humanly-conducted and laborious. Moreover, seeking the ”best” set of partners involves non-additive criteria such as the delivery time (i.e. business services can be performed in sequence or in parallel within the process). In this context, this paper presents a decision support system based on an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm to exploit collaborative knowledge gathered from companies on a dedicated platform (companies’ profile models registered to the platform and collaborative opportunity models) and deduce quasi-optimal collaborative business processes. A prototype that supports this system is also presented.

Introduction

In the current economic context, surviving as an isolated company has become unrealistic. The necessity to quickly respond to the emerging market opportunities leads to two consequences: (i) the companies have to react quickly and (ii) must be ready to establish new collaborations dedicated to the specific opportunities. While the recent advances in information technologies have enabled the creation of useful tools to support the coordination between the partners of a collaboration, there is still a lack when it comes to help companies in their collaborations (i.e. share and achieve common goals with other 10 heterogeneous enterprises). In most of the cases designing cross-organizational collaborations relies on empirical abilities, informally held by specific people in the company. As a result, the scope of potential partners remains narrow and there is a lack of flexibility when mounting on-the-fly collaborations dedicated to emerging opportunities. 15 In this sense, the notion of interoperability of organizations has emerged as the ability of heterogeneous systems to build harmonious and intentional collaborative behaviors without needing deep changes in their structure [34]. Among many methods, Mu et al. [27] claim that setting up an ontology-based mediation information system appears to be the best way to ensure interoperability be20 cause, on the contrary to other methods, it doesn’t rely on any standardization often laborious to integrate and update on a long term. Moreover, interoperability concerns the business level as well as the technical level of a collaboration, which, in information systems, can be transposed as business process and workflows respectively. A Mediation Information System (MIS) [46] is a suitable 25 solution to bridge the gap between both business and technical levels by dealing with process orchestration and technical service selection. However, before the collaborative process can be orchestrated, it has to be designed. This research is part of a bigger project called MISE (Mediation Information System Engineering) [2] that proposes to automatically set up MIS to fit the spe30 cific needs of inter-organizational collaborations. It is based on an Model-Driven Architecture and presents a knowledge-based system that can be decomposed into the following steps: (i) gather collaborative knowledge via business-oriented models, (ii) elaborate a suitable collaborative business process to reach the latter gathered collaborative objectives, (iii) turn the collaborative business process 35 into a technical workflow and (iv) orchestrate the workflow.