A web service-based brokering service for e-procurement in supply chains

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) development paradigm has emerged to improve the critical issues of creating, modifying and extending solutions for business processes integration incorporating process automation and automated exchange of information between organizations. Web services technology follows the SOA's principles for developing and deploying applications. Besides, Web services are considered as the platform for SOA, for both intra-and inter-enterprise communication. However, an SOA does not incorporate information about occurring events into business processes that are the main features of supply chain management. These events and information delivery are addressed in an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). Having this into account, we propose a Web service-based system named BPIMS-WS that offers a brokering service for the procurement of products in supply chain management scenarios. As salient contributions, our system provides a hybrid architecture combining features both SOA and EDA and a set of mechanisms for business processes pattern management, monitoring based on UML sequence diagrams, Web services-based management, event publish/subscription and reliable messaging service.