An Extended Petri-Net Based Approach for Supply Chain Process Enactment in Resource-Centric Web Service Environment

Xiaodong Wang², Xiaoyu Zhang², Hongming Cai¹, and Boyi Xu³

¹School of Software, Shanghai JiaoTong University, Shanghai, China
hmcai@sjtu.edu.cn

²BIT Institute, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
wangxd.sjtu@googlemail.com
xiaoyu.zhang.cn@googlemail.com

³Antai College of Economic&Management, Shanghai JiaoTong University, Shanghai, China
byxu@sjtu.edu.cn

Abstract. Enacting a supply-chain process involves variant partners and different IT systems. REST receives increasing attention for distributed systems with loosely coupled resources. Nevertheless, resource model incompatibilities and conflicts prevent effective process modeling and deployment in resource-centric Web service environment. In this paper, a Petri-net based framework for supply-chain process integration is proposed. A resource meta-model is constructed to represent the basic information of resources. Then based on resource meta-model, XML schemas and documents are derived, which represent resources and their states in Petri-net. Thereafter, XML-net, a high level Petri-net, is employed for modeling control and data flow of process. From process model in XML-net, RESTful services and choreography descriptions are deduced. Therefore, unified resource representation and RESTful services description are proposed for cross-system integration in a more effective way. A case study is given to illustrate the approach and the desirable features of the approach are discussed.

Keywords: supply chain, RESTful web service, Petri-Net, XML-Net, WADL

LNCS 5870, p. 130 ff.

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