A model for process-driven cooperative enterprise process communication

The ability of enterprises to react quickly to changes in the business environment is becoming imperative. More and more communication models have been developed to support virtual enterprises consisting of multiple organizations. A common problem arising in the different domains is multi-organization communication and exchange data. The traditional centralized communication methods are not appropriate because of the existence of private information and decision-making authorities at different organizations. These difficulties as well as the heterogeneity of the distributed environment make it challenging to develop an efficient framework for communication that can obtain a high-quality solution under different conditions to solve large-scale problems. This paper proposes a methodology for a virtual heterogeneous systems integration platform using a communication union model and a workflow-based service discovery mechanism. Using Web services technology we have implemented a heterogeneous information system interoperability framework, and developed a prototype system for heterogeneous information systems to validate the communication model.