A Service-Oriented Architecture Based Vendor Managed Inventory System

In this paper, we present a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based system to meet the on-demand VMI requirements. SOA is used to create flexible and efficient loosely-coupled systems . We utilize technologies including web services, SOAP, HTTP, XML and WSDL to develop a VMI system. Web services can support the integration of information and services across platforms and operating systems. In addition, we implement web service coordination (WS-Coordination) to enable coordinated transactions across platforms. WS-Coordination is a specification for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. Also, we present workflow of VMI operations from two aspects: seller¿s market and buyer¿s market. Finally, we use the business process execution language (BPEL) for web services to describe business processes of VMI. Service components are deployed flexibly in web environment using the Apache Axis2 web services engine.