Implementing enterprise collaboration using web services and software agents

Global competition has forced manufacturing enterprises to collaborate together towards fulfilling market demands and satisfying customers. Through collaboration, enterprises will be able to share and effectively utilise their resources. A major challenge in implementing enterprise collaboration is based on the integration of heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. Service-oriented computing, an emerging paradigm in distributed computing, empowers applications integration over the network regardless of platforms and environments. Software agents have been recognised as a promising technology for dealing with cooperation, coordination and decision-making in distributed applications. 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 essential functionalities in typical collaborations such as resource discovery, workflow designing, requests reasoning, tasks assigning and monitoring. In addition, this paper proposes an agent-based multi-layer structure for service discovery to improve the expected functionalities of resource discoveries and their operation more effectively.