A process-centric engineering Web services framework

Abstract

Collaborative and distributed engineering Web services are emerging as a viable alternative to the traditional design and engineering process automation. Existing approaches have limitations in supporting long-running engineering transactions, automatic engineering process orchestration and choreography, synchronous and asynchronous conversation, and geometric abstraction for transmission and sharing. In this paper, we present a process-centric engineering Web services framework to overcome these limitations by utilizing BPEL-based (business process execution language) process templates and coordination broker-based conversation support. This paper also discusses the synchronization of engineering Web services, which can be either peer-centric or process-centric to support long-running engineering transactions and conversation. The process orchestration and choreography broker works as a service dispatching and aggregation agent for executing process templates, which enables the individual activity of the engineering process to dynamically invoke one of the alternative Web services through the run-time process brokering. Further, the paper presents how to support collaboration over the running process using conversation policy .