Infrastructure for virtual enterprises in large-scale open systems

This paper presents SALE, a middleware platform for mission-critical applications built upon the CORBA architecture and its extensions for real-time (RT-CORBA), fault tolerance (FT-CORBA) and security (CORBASec). The SALE platform provides different reliability, security and real-time properties, which are specified by applications as quality of service (QoS) requirements. Preliminary results obtained through the implementation of this platform allow us to use it as an infrastructure for business-to-business applications. This infrastructure provides a multi-agent system for production scheduling of virtual enterprises, in which timing requirements must be enforced in order to execute a manufacturing process cooperatively.