Using business process specifications and agents to integrate a scenario-driven supply chain

In today’s increasingly competitive global market, most enterprises place great stress on reducing order fulfillment costs, minimizing time-to-market and maximizing product quality. The desire of businesses to achieve these goals has seen a shift from a make-to-stock paradigm to a make-to-order paradigm. The success of the make-to-order paradigm requires robust and efficient supply chain integration and implementation in the business-to-business (B2B) environment. Recent Internet-based approaches to this problem have enabled efficient and effective information sharing among trading partners (i.e., customers, manufacturers and suppliers). Here we present an integration framework for supply chain operations among trading partners in the B2B environment. A supply chain scenario is formed, for which an integration framework is proposed by using the concepts of business process specifications (BPS) and agent technology. The BPS with message choreographies among the trading partners is detailed by using a modified unified modelling language (UML). The behaviour of the enterprise applications within each trading partner is modelled as agent concepts by using Petri-nets, which depict how the enterprise applications respond to external events specified in the BPS. The concepts and models proposed in this paper should provide the starting point for the formulation of a structured approach to B2B supply chain integration and implementation.