More than one business entity can be involved in an interaction.  For example, Bob Smith, a business entity playing the party role of a customer, requests information about cable modem service from Joe Jones, a business entity playing the party role of a customer service representative.<br/>In some cases, the Party related to the business interaction plays a temporary role that relates only to the interaction lifecycle (for example, the person reporting a customer problem), in such cases it is possible to model a Party involvement with Business Interaction (in addition to PartyRole involvement).<br/>As stated earlier, business entities involved in an interaction can also be resources.  For example,<br/>a) A soft drink machine receives an inquiry from a third-party servicing agent (or an automatic timed status report transmission from the machine) to gather data on the stock level, fault or performance data or even a cash transaction report.<br/>b) Activation instructions could be delivered to your home heating/cooling system ready for your arrival. A burglar alarm could send a video image of an intruder to a monitoring office.<br/>c) A car could have a mobile radio device to communicate with the engine management system as well as the vehicle user.  This could be an extension of a personal communicator using a ‘Blue Tooth’ radio access system.<br/>Business entities involved in an interaction can also be customer accounts.  For example, different products offerings involved as interaction items could be charged to one or more customer accounts.<br/>The figure below depicts the relationship that business entities have with business interactions and how the business entities party role, resource role, business partner account and customer account, are involved in business interactions.<br/>