Flexible inter-enterprise workflow management using e-services

Abstract

This paper presents a solution to achieve dynamic Inter-enterprise workflow management using the e-services provided by collaborative e-business enterprises. E-services are distributed services that can be accessed programmatically on the Internet, using SOAP messages and the HTTP protocol. We categorize e-services according to their business types and manage them in an UDDI-enabled Broker Server. By E-service requests are specified in the activities of a process model according to some standardized e-service templates and are bound to the proper service providers at run-time by using a constraint-based, dynamic service binding mechanism. The workflow management system is dynamic in the sense that the actual business organizations that take part in a business process are not determined until run-time.