An hybrid intermediation architectural approach for integrating cross-organizational services

Nowadays, workflow research has shifted from fundamentals of workflow modelling and enactment towards improvement of the workflow modelling lifecycle and integration of workflow enactment engines with new enabling technologies for process invocation. These efforts along with the workflow component reusability trend, aim at tackling the issues concerning the dynamic and distributed environment of the e-business domain. Other totally distributed technologies like the intelligent multi Agent Systems proved to face some of the special requirements of conducting business through Internet, but they still present credibility problems concerning the overall control of the processes. We propose a web-based ''intermediation hybrid architecture'' for integrating services by exploiting and combining the advantages of strict centralized topologies that use workflow engines, with totally distributed systems which use agent technologies.