Implementing enterprise collaboration using web services and software agents
Akbar Siami Namin, Weiming Shen, Hamada H. Ghenniwa · International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations · 2006
Global competition has forced manufacturing enterprises to collaborate towards fulfilling market demands and satisfying customers. A major challenge in implementing enterprise collaboration is on the integration of heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. This paper proposes to implement enterprise collaborations by employing web services and software agents. It presents a multi-layer architecture for enterprises' software infrastructure capable of accomplishing the necessary functionalities in typical collaborations such as resource discovery, workflow coordination, request analyses, tasks assignment and monitoring. In addition, this paper proposes an agent-based multi-layer structure for service discovery to improve the functionality and efficiency of resource discovery.