BIS-Grid - Grid-based integration and orchestration of business information systems

Business Information Systems (BIS) facilitate resource management within an organisation (ERP systems), efficient customer relationship management (CRM systems), and production and service support (PDM systems), to name a few. In order to create such information systems, often both existing and new subsystems have to be adapted and integrated. Thereby, workflow systems are employed to support the effective and efficient integration of organisational workflows by means of subsystem services orchestration. In doing so, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has gained a tremendous relevance to the realisation of business processes that typically affect multiple information systems within one or multiple organisations. This integration of information systems is accomplished via orchestration in service-oriented architectures (SOA) which especially aim at effectively mapping the application domain to the technology. Since Grid services are introduced with corresponding standards that are based on Web service technologies (such as OGSA and WSRF), Grid technologies can also be used to build SOA. Thereby, Grid technologies and EAI have much in common since both technologies focus on integration problems within a heterogeneous environment – Grid technologies on resource level and EAI on application level.

In BIS-Grid, we intend to realise a horizontal service grid in the application domain of business information systems. The overall goal is to enable Grid technologies to be used for the integration of decentralised business information systems. This will be achieved by developing and providing organisational and technical extensions based on the current state of the art in Grid technologies, EAI, and SOA. On the organisational layer, we will develop new forms of inter-organisational collaboration and new business models. On the technical layer, we will extend WS-BPEL-based orchestration to allow the orchestration of stateful WSRF-based Grid services. Thereby, we plan to integrate existing middleware systems that are already well-established in the commercial sector such as JBoss (www.jboss.com), and Grid-specific middleware systems such as UNICORE 6 (www.unicore.eu).

The achievement of these goals will be evaluated by means of two application scenarios at our industrial partners. We will evaluate the developed generic services exemplarily for the integration of ERP, PDM, and CRM systems, covering the major sectors of business information processing. Thus, the results of BIS-Grid provide a significant contribution for applying Grid technologies in the domain of real-world business information systems integration.

To achieve an optimal exploitation of our results, we will also develop dedicated exploitation and marketing plans that especially aim at SMEs.

Via Grid providing or Grid software consulting, SMEs will be capable of providing additional IT services to the market and thus will be able to improve their market position. As a consequence, Grid technologies gain access to a whole new application domain. To summarise, our intent is to extend the application potential of Grid technologies to explicitly support SMEs in business information processing.

Project Webpage:
https://bi.offis.de/bisgrid

Contact:
Bernard Bauer, Holger Nitsche