A Web-Service Based Architecture for the Inter-Organizational Coordination of Activities

To support open process networks and virtual enterprises, activities have to be coordinated not only within an organization, but also between organizations. This inter-organizational coordination of activities creates new requirements, not met by existing architectures. Therefore, a new coordination architecture based on web services is developed. It uses a homogeneous and dynamic composition of so called aspect-elements to support the interorganizational coordination of activities. The coordination architecture provides coordination autonomy and knowledge encapsulation and offers both process evolution and scalability. At the same time, the benefits provided by web services such as service autarchy, service extensibility, service integration and asynchronous service evolution are maintained.