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framework is discussed in section 5. Finally, section
6 makes a conclusion of the paper.
2 RELATED WORKS
The term “workflow” originated in the mid-1980s
and became popular in the early 90’s. Since then,
many service providers have offered
general-purpose workflow management systems
(IBM, WebSpere MQ Workflow). We used these
workflows in two ways. One is to lead ERP
(Enterprise Resource Planning) systems to adopt a
workflow component. Another one is to include
workflow functionality in the enterprise application.
WISE (Workflow based Internet SErvices) is a
project conducted at Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (Alonso et al., 1999). The goals of
WISE are to develop and deploy the software
infrastructure necessary to support business to
business electronic commerce in the form of virtual
enterprises. The idea is to combine the tools and
services of different companies as building blocks of
a higher level system in which a process acts as the
blueprint for control and data flow within the virtual
enterprise. From this idea, the final goal is to build
the basic support for an Internet trading community
where enterprises can join their services to provide
added value processes.
CrossFlow is a European research project for
supporting cross-organizational workflow
management in virtual enterprises (Grefen et al.,
1999). Its goal is to develop and implement a
mechanism for connecting WfMS and other
WfMS-Like systems of different organizations in
cross-organization workflows and electronic
commerce settings. Crossflow defines a
service-oriented model for cross-organizational
workflows. In their service-oriented model, a service
provider of each service can be either an internal
resource (internal service) or an external
organization (external service). For an external
service, service selection at run-time will be based
on the QoS parameters given in service
specifications.
Sangam is a universal interoperation protocol for
e-service broking communities using private UDDI
nodes (Helal et al., 2002) (Jagatheesan et al., 2003).
It aims to achieve more relevant and interoperable
brokering of e-services in a highly scalable and
dynamic environment of e-services.
3 HIERARCHICAL BROKER
FRAMEWORK
3.1 Architecture and Technology
Hierarchical Broker Framework is a framework
which connects every service and marketplace on
the internet. The main idea of this framework comes
from the “domain name mechanism” on the internet
and the “inheritance concept” on object-oriented
programming. The former can help us create this
framework more uniformly, whereas the latter can
keep sellers to enter this framework with little
efforts.
The traditional marketplace provides a place
where sellers can publish their services or products,
and buyers can search in this online catalog for those
services which they need. The marketplace owner
needs to maintain this online catalog. It has many
different domains and different presenting methods
in each marketplace, and it may be difficult for
buyers to find the desired services, thus the matching
mechanism is very important.
The main idea of Hierarchical Broker Framework
is to connect each special marketplace by a
classified framework. There are only two kinds of
components in this framework, Intelligent Broker
and Adapter Agent. Each Intelligent Broker can
independently be extended to a sub-marketplace, and
the Adapter Agent is a member in this
sub-marketplace.
Figure 1: Traditional Marketplace & Hierarchical Broker
Frameworks
In this framework, an Intelligent Broker is
mapped to a sub-marketplace, whereas an Adapter
Agent is mapped to a service. In Figure 2, we can
see how this framework integrates these specific
Intelligent Brokers. By this framework, not only
services but also Intelligent Brokers have a unique
place in this classified framework. The unique place
stands for the position of this service and its relation
with other services in this framework.
AUTOMATIC INTEGRATION OF INTER-ENTERPRISE PROCESSES WITH HIERARCHICAL BROKER
FRAMEWORK
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