Providing production planning and control functionality by web services: State of the art and experiences with prototypes

Web services have received an increasing importance over the last years, especially in connection with service oriented architectures (SOA) for the automation of business processes. Some authors anticipate that traditional ERP systems will lose their importance in the near future. We report on the development of software prototypes that allow the experimental investigation of these expectations at the laboratory level. We find that production planning and control (PPC) functionality can be offered by web services, but a systematic identification of appropriate services that encapsulate PPC functionality is not straightforward and requires more research. Data management issues and transaction processing, that are an important part of integrated applications, have to be re-invented in service-based application systems.