A distributed service oriented infrastructure for business process management in Virtual Organizations

Virtual Organizations (VO)-a network of independent organizations collaborating to address specific business opportunities-have become popular in today´s technology driven business environment business climate. Although many solutions have been proposed over past two decades to support inter-organizational interactions, VOs still face several challenges due to their dynamic and temporal nature that cannot be addressed by the traditional solutions such as ebXML and EDI. In this paper, we propose a distributed architecture for a flexible infrastructure that supports collaborative business process execution, monitoring and management. The infrastructure supports the common topologies of inter-organizational collaboration (e.g. peer-to-peer, star, linear), and responds well to changes due to its loosely coupled components. The proposed infrastructure is based on federating multiple SOA infrastructures with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as its core. It is implemented using IBM WebSphere products. We demonstrate that the proposed SOA-based virtual organization facilitates flexibility, rapid process integration and dynamic evolution.