Research on architecture of ERP for small & medium-size enterprise based on agent and SOA

With the rapid development of information technology and the gradual extension of information technology to enterprise, ERP systems become more and more complex and some new requirements that focus on both manufacturing activities and the supply chain are brought forward. To address these problems, a MAERP system architecture based on SOA has been developed, in which the communication and information exchanges are realized between agents (based on KQML and SOAP) by means of Communication Switch Agent. To illustrate the architecture, a simulation work has been proposed and the results implied that the architecture provides a very efficient method to design ERP systems for small & medium-size Enterprises with the purposes of scalability, extensibility, flexibility to achieve the business agility, reusability of the intelligent component, and cooperation between application systems to assure a global optimization. The objectives of this paper illustrate the architecture of ERP systems based on agent for small & medium-size Enterprises, and the approach how a web services-based SOA supports our MAERP system.