Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a major problem confronting manufacturing organizations that have deployed large-scale enterprise information systems and aim to coordinate inter- and intraorganizational product development, supply-chain, and customer management activities. Successful EAI is a key enabling step toward implementation of viable Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) strategies. Extant EAI technologies, such as distributed object and messaging technologies for communication and ontology-based database schema integration, are tedious to develop and maintain in an organization. Though workflow management systems have enabled process coordination of both manual and system-oriented tasks in organizations, coping with the lack of adaptability and inter-operability in workflow systems is a manual and resource intensive effort. Recent advances in (i) standardized, modular, and distributed software delivery frameworks, such as web services; (ii) standard semantic markup languages for developing domain ontologies; and (iii) intelligent process coordination frameworks promise the development of flexible, responsive, integrated, and organic process management architectures. In this paper, we present an intelligent mediator-based architecture for enabling EAI. Intraorganizational information sources and services are made available via a web-services framework. An Integrated Service Planning and Execution (ISP&E) framework interleaves service composition and execution at the mediator to fulfill service requests. Processes that interleave information gathering and transactional tasks are generated using domain-independent Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) AI planning and a domain-specific ontology and then executed in a scalable and reliable manner. Benefits and limitations of mediator-based frameworks for EAI and topics for further research are discussed based on a prototype development experience.
Issue Section:
Technical Papers
Keywords:
process planning,
process control,
manufacturing data processing,
computer aided production planning,
planning (artificial intelligence),
supply chains,
customer relationship management,
life cycle costing,
workflow management software,
open systems,
semantic Web,
distributed object management,
Mediator,
Web Services,
Interleaving Planning and Execution,
Semantic Web
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