2010-03-31 | Exchange of Information between mobile Members

As part of the project "Robot2Business", funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics, solutions for the integration of mobile members into business processes are developed.

There are two industrial partners in the project, who bring in use case scenarios, the IT service company "CADsys Vertriebs- und Entwicklungs GmbH" and the agricultural machinery manufacturer "CLAAS Selbstfahrende Erntemaschinen GmbH". This report deals with two basic services, which are essential for the top goal (integration of mobile machines into business processes) and which arose from the use case scenarios of CLAAS.

For modeling and execution of the business processes an IT-environment based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is set up, in which the systems communicate via web services.

As a major requirement for web service communication, the complete addressing information of the requested web service needs to be known. In static IT environments, in which the systems are permanently available, this prerequisite is usually fulfilled. But if the environment consists of mobile members the systems need to configure themselves, because the addressing information of the requested web services change whenever changes in the availability of the members occur.

The second requirement this report deals with is the development of a store-carry-forward mechanism to transfer data in case of no direct connection between sender and receiver. The idea behind this is that the data is transferred from machine to machine until it finally reaches the desired receiver. The functionality of this mechanism is demonstrated by a use case scenario from CLAAS.

Link to Report