Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Agent-based workflow model for enterprise collaboration

Workflow management system supports the automation of business processes where a collection of tasks is organized between participants according to a defined set of rules to accomplish some business goals. The service-orientated computing paradigm is transforming traditional workflow management from a close, centralized control system into a dynamic information exchange and business process. Moreover, agent based workflow, from another point of view, provides a flexible mechanism for dynamic workflow coordination at run time. In this context, the combination of Web services and software agents provides great flexibility to discover and establish relationships among business partners. This thesis proposes an agent-based workflow model in support of inter-enterprise workflow management. In the proposed model, agent-based technology enables the workflow coordination at both inter- and intra- enterprise levels while semantic Web and Web services based technologies provide infrastructures for messaging, service description, service discovery, workflow ontology, and workflow enactment. Coordination agents and resource agents are used with a Contract Net protocol based bidding mechanism for constructing a dynamic workflow process among business partners. The agent system architecture, workflow models and related components are described. A prototype system is implemented for the purpose of designing and developing role-feasible agents for simulating the formation process of a virtual enterprise

Building and Evaluating a SOA-Based Model for Purchase Order Management in E-Commerce System

E-Commerce systems are characterized by complex Web applications that use different operating systems and different technologies. One of the most popular E-Commerce applications is conducted between businesses (B2B) and between a business and a consumer (B2C) is Purchase Order Management. It consists of components such as Sales, Shipping and Billing. In many cases nowadays Purchase Order Management components use integration approaches that lack interoperability and manageability resulting in customer dissatisfaction, time consumption and excessive costs. In this research, we build a model to overcome shortcomings of current Purchase Order Management system. The model is based on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and Web services. They offer many advantages and help achieve the goals of interoperability and manageability. The proposed model is evaluated by using a scenario based software architecture method and proves that it achieves the quality attributes set as goals for the model which are interoperability and manageability. A case study of the model is implemented as a prove-of-concept. A specific usage scenario for the model is discussed and further proves that the model accomplishes its functionality and quality attributes

Business process management: a bird's-eye view and research agenda.

Processes; Management; Research;