Distributed Process Integration: Experiences and Opportunities for Future Research

There is a need for new information technology solutions that can help automate process coordination and integration tasks among enterprises. In this paper we describe the development of a simple process connector to link two scheduling applications. We describe specific challenges that we faced when building our prototype connector, especially in light of different levels of detail and constraints that must be propagated across the processes. We also report on some of the lessons learned from implementing our prototype and identify opportunities for future research. Our prototype and examples are specific to the construction domain but our results can be applied to process integration in other domains.