Supply chains provide composite services or products by utilizingautonomous, heterogeneous and/or conversational services provided byindependent enterprises. In this paper, we propose a service-orientedprocess (SOP) model that can model and construct efficientmulti-enterprise supply chains as multi-enterprise processes (MEPs). Inparticular, the SOP model supports service activities for modeling theservices themselves, primitives for composing supply chains fromservices, and primitives for automating service coordination as requiredby a supply chain. One of the most important aspects of service modelingin SOP is decoupling the service interface from the serviceimplementation. This enables MEPs and the corresponding supply chains toinclude placeholders, i.e. activities specified only by an abstractinterface. These placeholders are substituted at run-time with one ofthe available services that implement the specified abstract interface.The SOP service selection policy uses a semantic broker that hasknowledge about the service capabilities and quality. Therefore, a MEP(and hence its supply chain) is capable of on-the-fly choice of theservice providers that are best suited to its objectives (e.g. cheapest,fastest, or just available)
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