Dynamic Inter-Enterprise Workflow Management in a Constraint-Based E-Service Infrastructure

Abstract

This paper presents an infrastructure and a mechanism for achieving dynamic Inter-enterprise workflow management using 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. In this work, we categorize e-services according to their business types and manage them in a UDDI-enabled constraint-based Broker Server. 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, which take part in a business process, are not determined until run-time. We have extended the traditional workflow process modeling by including e-service requests in activity specifications and extended the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) by including constraints in both service specifications and service requests so that the selection of e-service providers can be more accurately performed.