An Extended Petri-Net Based Approach for Supply Chain Process Modeling and Web Service Transformation

A supply chain process involves variant departments and organizations and has its specialties distinguishing it from other business processes. To implement it in a SOA framework, unified service description is required. Nevertheless, the work of deriving service description from process models is arduous and inaccurately. To solve the problem, a novel approach is proposed. Firstly, meta-data for process model is extracted from SCOR (supply chain operation reference model), which provides standardized terminology and definitions for supply chain management. Thereafter, XML-Nets, a high-level Petri-Net, is employed for description of such process models and relevant characteristics of supply chain, as well for the following mapping models to service description. Finally, with aids of mapping rules, general description for service interface and orchestration can be smoothly derived, which comprehensively describe supply chain process and well support further IT development, analysis and improvements of supply chain management.