CRAFT: A framework for integration facilitation in cross-organisational distributed systems

Abstract

The increasing proliferation of complex electronic services, particularly in the business-to-business area, entails the creation and management of complex, cross-organisational distributed systems. An important challenge with such systems concerns the integration of different core and administrative services into a consistent whole. Furthermore, there is a need for extra functionality to facilitate the provision and consumption of the resulting service inside as well as outside the organisation. This functionality may have to deal with a host of issues such as: facilitating co-operation while maintaining autonomy, remuneration, monitoring, auditing and management of the integrated service, and the translation between internal and external models, processes and information. All the above are aimed at ensuring that the contractual obligations of the business relationship are met. We need a component that supports the integration of the core and administrative services while providing added functionality concerned with crossing the organisational boundary. This component is termed an "integration facilitator". The CrossFlow project dealt with the dynamic establishment of cross-organisational business relationships. CRAFT (CrossFlow Runtime Framework Technology) provides a framework to build integration facilitators. By using this framework, the core and administrative services of an organisation can be quickly integrated and extended to create different business level services to suit the changing needs of organisations and their dynamic business partnerships.