Federated Process Framework in a Virtual Enterprise Using an Object-oriented Database and Extensible Markup Language

Abstract

Process information sharing is a beneficial tool through which participating organizations in a virtual enterprise can improve their customer services and business performance. However, autonomy and agility of the organizations have placed limitations in the development of process information sharing, which the previous research has not satisfactorily addressed. This paper proposes a federated process framework and its system architecture that provide a conceptual design for effective implementation of process information sharing supporting the autonomy and agility of the organizations. First, in terms of autonomy, the federated process framework supports a flexible sharing policy to control the amount of shared data so that the framework can be applied to a wide variety of practical situations from loosely-coupled cases to tightly-coupled cases. Second, in terms of agility, the system architecture based on the federated process framework supports the entire life cycle of process information sharing by allowing sufficient adaptability to the changes of business environments. We develop the framework using an object-oriented database and Extensible Markup Language to accommodate all the constructs and their interactions within object-oriented message exchange model.