Towards a workflow-based integration architecture for business networking

The Internet is the underlying network infrastructure that will allow enterprises to create new business structures and to reconfigure existing ones. This trend, which is known as business networking, requires enterprises to be able to integrate and coordinate business processes that extend across autonomous business partners. Traditionally, the problem of integration has been addressed by the field of Enterprise Integration, which underlines the importance of Workflow Management as a tool for business process integration. In the context of business networking, most of the principles of Enterprise Integration and Workflow Management are still useful but, definitely, a new kind of architecture is required. This paper proposes a decentralized inter-enterprise workflow solution, paving the way towards an integration architecture that will allow enterprises to automate their business relationships and to develop arbitrary business networks.