Service-based Interoperability - Leveraging Web Services for Implementing Industry Standards

With deeper levels of external process integration and a growing number of electronic business relationships, enterprises strive for becoming more interoperable with their business partners. Although B2B standards are supposed to ensure scalable B2B integration and m:n connectivity, enterprises face the challenge of ambiguous interpretations of standards when it comes to their implementation. This paper develops a conceptual model for service-based B2B interoperability which leverages web service technologies for implementing industry standards. The authors instantiate the conceptual model in a concrete B2B scenario in the automotive industry where a consortium of automotive manufacturers and suppliers are currently redesigning their inter-organizational Engineering change Management (ECM) processes. From the evaluation, they conclude that it is not sufficient to specify that standards are used related to pragmatics, semantics and syntax. In order to ensure interoperability, additional design rules are needed which define how industry standards are mapped to a web service design.