Architecture support for flexible chain management

In competitive markets, organizations collaborate in business chains using dynamic service outsourcing to deliver complex products and services. To enable the flexible formation of business chains, organizations can use protocol adaptation to ensure that their business protocols are compatible. In this paper, we present three different software architectures that enable the flexible formation and enactment of different chain structures, in which the protocol adaptation component is a key enabler. We show the feasibility of the approach by extending software architecture definitions from the literature for each flexible chain formation case