Agent based web service composition in the context of a supply-chain based workflow

Abstract

With the advent of Web Services, more and more business organizations make their services available on the Internet through Web Services and also use other services that are available on the corporate Intranet. From the viewpoint of workflow systems, these freely available Web Services and the proprietary intranet-based services should be integrated into individual businesses for their day-to-day workflows. Businesses that use Web Services not only provide the services to their customers but can also use Web Services to customize their internal processing, such as online order placement for raw materials. In this paper we describe the architecture of our agent-based workflow system that can be used for Web Service composition. In the context of an example from the apparel manufacturing industry, we demonstrate how Web Services can be composed and used.