Towards a Model-based Service Integration Framework for Extensible Enterprise Systems

In the vision of an Internet of Services (Janiesch et al. 2008, S. 71-75), services will become tradable similar to manufactured goods. Organizations dynamically interact as service consumers and service providers making use of a service marketplace to design, offer and consume services. With the emergence of such service ecosystems (Barros and Dumas 2006, S. 31-37), the simplified consumption of services (Papazoglou 2007, S. 5-6) becomes a key challenge for enterprise organizations. The direct integration of services (offered via a service marketplace) into standard business applications running within enterprise systems (e.g. ERP systems) is most promising as these systems reflect the core business processes of an organization and can flexibly be enriched with complementary services. From the perspective of an enterprise system two different service integration scenarios can be distinguished (Figure 1). In the first scenario the enterprise system is extended with a service using a predefined service interface that has explicitly been foreseen by the enterprise system provider when the system was shipped. Examples are (de-facto) standard interfaces for Business-to-Business (B2B) or Application-to-Application (A2A) integration scenarios known from the area of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). In the second scenario the enterprise system is extended with a service using a service interface that has not been foreseen by the enterprise system provider when the system was shipped. Before the service can be used core business application(s) running within the enterprise system need to be adapted/extended on the affected application layers, e.g. by adding new UI elements (presentation layer), adding a new process step (business process layer) or extending a business object with a new field (business object layer). Examples are services innovated by service providers in dynamically evolving service ecosystems. In both scenarios structural-