The TuCSoN Coordination Infrastructure for Virtual Enterprises

Virtual Enterprises (VE) and Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) require deployable and flexible infrastructures, promoting the integration of heterogenous resources and services, as well as the development of new VE's business processes in terms of workflow (WF) rules coordinating the activities of VE's component enterprises. In this paper, we argue that a suitable general-purpose coordination infrastructure may well fit the needs of VE management in a highly dynamic and unpredictable environment like the Internet, by providing engineers with the abstractions and run-time support to address heterogeneity of different sorts, and to represent WF rules as coordination laws. We discuss the requirements for VE infrastructures, and suggest why VE management and WFMS may be seen as coordination problems. Then, we introduce the TuCSoN coordination model and technology, and show, both in principle and in a simple case study, how such a coordination infrastructure can support the design and development of VE's WFMS.