Flexible Business Process Integration for Clusters of Small-Medium Sized Enterprises in Heterogenous Environment

Abstract

Industry clusters-groups of geographically proximate enterprises in the same industry are a striking feature of the geography of economic activity and greatly impact the overall economic development. However, most of them are low-cost-based clusters that are composed of small-medium enterprises which needs social electronic services and flexible business process integration. In this paper, we present an on-demand information service platform for small-medium enterprise clusters and propose loosely-coupled service-oriented business process integration scheme for this platform. Several key techniques such as business application definition language and graphical representation for integration in heterogenous environment, packaging and executive strategy for integrating services, dependency set and context of integration service, and mapping translation based on synonymous semantic definition are proposed. Professional services can be provided via this platform to promote the enterprises’ innovative ability and help business to gain competitive advantages. The platform and the related techniques have been applied in realistic textile industrial clusters.