Research On Business Interoperability Points Based Enterprise Interoperability Approach

Business collaboration between enterprises is becoming increasingly frequent and complicated by the driven of the economic globalization wave. As the essential support system for enterprise operation and management, each enterprise’s application softwares must also be connected, to support the exchange of information and business cooperation between enterprises. The concept and technology of Enterprise Interoperability arises at the historic moment, it refers to the enterprises applications complete the task together through mutual communication and exchange of data between each other, to realize the business process integration between enterprise partners.The current research about enterprise interoperability model and technology primarily aims at the local legacy applications between enterprises, mainly for the attention to eliminate the heterogeneity between application softwares, to maximum reuse legacy enterprise applications, and to improve the efficiency of the information transfer between enterprises, to reduce the cost of collaboration between enterprises. However, as the cloud applications become hot, the cloud applications are used by more and more enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises."Cross-platform","multi-tenancy" and other characteristics of cloud applications have brought new challenges for interoperability between enterprises.If we put forward a set of framework and method to realize the seamless interoperability between enterprise cloud applications, cloud applications and enterprise legacy applications, to meet the needs of the enterprise business collaboration, with the reusability, heterogeneity, reliability, and dynamic variability characteristics, will be a very important practical significance.Research group has set up a sales and purchasing cloud platform for the auto industry based on the study around service computing and informatization of manufacturing industry. And to realize the interoperability of enterprise users on the cloud platform is one of the problems to be solved. This paper does some working around this requirement, from the point of theory framework and practical application, researching on automobile enterprise interoperability method under the environment of supply chain.First, this paper studies and summarizes the interoperability scenarios under the background of the auto industry enterprises and problems, based on the support of cloud platform, puts forward an abstract multi-layered interoperability framework which contains the presentation layer, application layer and process layer, service layer and data layer, analyzes interoperability requirements in different layers.In order to uniformly solve the different points of the interoperability problem reflected in the multi-layered framework, this paper puts forward the concept of business interoperability point. It is the point where information transmission and data exchange take place between two enterprise application softwares, and it is the medium to realize the application softwares interoperability between collaborative enterprises. Combination with the concept of business interoperability point, there is no need for the total integration of two application systems which to carry out business collaboration, making the abstract multi-layered interoperability model become feasible.This paper gives the concrete scheme of the interoperability realization according to the enterprise interoperability framework based on the business interoperability points, and designs an interoperability engine which supports business collaboration between enterprises on the cloud platform. The architecture of cloud platform interoperability engine has two layers which can be regarded as the foreground and the background. The foreground participates in the user interaction is called "business interoperability agent (BIP_Agent)", and the background to do technical support is called "ESB based interoperability bus (I_Bus)". The foreground is mainly responsible for the registration and exposure of business interoperability points, and the creating and invoking of the interoperability processes. The latter is responsible for the adapting and matching of the interfaces between business interoperability points, and the listening and routing of interoperability requests.Finally, this paper introduces the concrete implementation of I_Bus which is taken as the core component of the cloud platform interoperability engine based on the key support technology Web Service and ESB, and describes the whole process of interoperability between enterprises through an actual business process between manufacturer and supplier tenants on the cloud platform. Eventually we verify the feasibility and validity of the research results in this paper, and enable the cloud platform can preliminary support the business collaboration between enterprises.