Business processes oriented heterogeneous systems integration platform for networked enterprises

Supply chains, dynamic alliances, e-business, extended enterprises, and virtual organizations are typical networked enterprises which are formed based on partner companies' core competencies. Different partners have different infrastructures: the interoperability among heterogeneous systems is the solid foundation for the networked enterprise to work seamlessly and effectively. Due to the distributed and heterogeneous characteristics of different partner companies, it is a big challenge to implement a satisfying and cost effective solution in the networked enterprise. Aiming at the problems of system integration and cross-system interoperability, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a new integration pattern and relative system infrastructure. The key for the development and implementation of SOA is services encapsulation and orchestration of applications through certain mechanism to operate a complex business. However, cross infrastructures services access protection and relative services orchestration are still the bottleneck for the SOA implementation. This paper develops a business processes oriented heterogeneous systems integration platform with relative methodology for networked enterprises integration. The platform is a space distributed and management centralized platform for networked enterprises. The service access agent (SAA) mechanism is developed to realize cross-domains identity authentication, service authorization, and information transmission security. Every Web service or SAA in the platform has a unique ID. The interoperating process only relies on IDs, which endows the platform with a loose coupling feature. Aiming at service orchestration, a graphic service process modelling method is developed, with which the developed process model can link atom Web services and form a complex service. The Java based service orchestration tool provides an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) independent service orchestration and deployment. Those services that are results of orchestration can be orchestrated as an atom service in another orchestrating process. Thus, the platform can support orchestration decomposition. The structure approach of the business process modelling based platform implementation is developed, which provides a guideline for platform installation, services modelling, service encapsulation, service orchestration, and service deployment. Two cases are provided to illustrate the usage of the platform in industries. The development of this platform is an open source project. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.