Support for collaborative, dynamic logistic networks

We introduce the results of the project "life-cycle support for dynamic virtual enterprises". In this project a central Web based platform is developed to support the life-cycle of dynamic, vertical logistic networks. This platform has to provide a set of services to support the collaborating companies during the single phases of the cooperation. These phases and services are described in detail. For the description of the implementation of this platform, we focus on the business document exchange service. This service is realised by a Web service based interface of the platform, so that the collaborating enterprises can easily integrate their possibly existing applications with the platform. We give an detailed description of the used standard for the business documents, the principal operation mode of Web services and the actual implementation of the services.