Semantic Enhanced Rule Driven Workflow Execution in Collaborative Virtual Enterprise

Abstract

Globalization leads to an efficient new business paradigm generally known as Collaborative Virtual Enterprise (CVE) which demands flexible service orchestration and robust workflow execution. As two major service orchestration strategies, OWL-S and BPEL have their own strength and deficiencies. To meet the challenge in CVE, in this paper, we propose a Workflow Execution System (WES) that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of these two technologies. On the one hand, having semantic support, OWL-S is used in dynamic service discovery and composition at high level. On the other hand, at the concrete level, industry-based BPEL is exploited in service execution. The description of each Semantic Web service is enhanced with rule-based modeling of the essential business logic behind the service interface. In order to realize interoperability in OWL-S and BPEL without loss of semantic information, we further proposed an OWLS2BPEL Mapper to facilitate the workflow robustness and support rule evaluation to increase responsiveness to customers. A concrete scenario in PC manufacturing Collaborative Virtual Enterprise is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our workflow execution system.