Process-centric engineering Web services in a distributed and collaborative environment

We propose a Web service oriented and process-centric framework for supporting collaborative engineering services. The proposed approach utilizes BPEL-based (Business Process Execution Language) process templates and coordination broker-based conversation support, which can support long-running engineering transactions, engineering service orchestration and choreography, conversation over the process, and context-awareness. The process template plays an important role as a federation of published engineering services. It is managed and executed by a process orchestration and choreography broker, which works as a service dispatching and aggregation agent. It is capable of federating processes, tools, operations, and knowledge bases into a dynamic and collaborative product development environment. The paper also discusses how to support collaboration over the running process using conversation policy. Further, the paper discusses how to utilize engineering contexts in support of querying and reasoning of engineering service-related knowledge. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.