A Study on an Application Integrated Model Supporting Inter-enterprise Collaboration

摘要

With the provision of knowledge in information exchange and business process management, we present an inter-enterprise application integration model. The proposed model is based on the technologies of XML, Web services, and Workflow. It leverages a 3-tier architecture; so all the public applications in enterprises are encapsulated as Web Services. Data exchanges between enterprises and interactions amongst those Web services are realized by the SOAP protocol. The BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) is adopted to efficiently organize and integrate the inter-enterprise Web Services. Furthermore, the semantic feature of BPEL4WS is extended, and a concept called ServiceContainer is presented to describe a number of services with the same type of ports and operations such that the model also supports service selection and substitution. Finally, we discuss some relevant issues, such as the scheduling algorithm for the engine and the security issues for the model.