Conclusion

In this chapter, we have introduced how to use Web services and Grid services to build advanced e-business infrastructure for intelligent enterprise. Specifically, we have introduced a conceptual architecture of building advanced e-business infrastructure using Web services technologies such as federated Web services discovery and Web services flow composition. In addition, we have presented an overview of OGSA and a concept of Universal grid service with a built-in standard interface, a business admission control unit and a self-aggregating component for enabling OGSA to support business process integration and management in a distributed environment.

We would like to conclude this chapter by introducing the relationships among the emerging technologies for building advanced e-business solution infrastructure for intelligent enterprise. Web services are integration technology, which will be used for Grid computing systems and other emerging technologies to define their core service interfaces. Meanwhile, it provides a standard way for enabling application integration using a standard protocol. In our view, Grid is a very useful architecture framework that could be used to build the infrastructure backbone for distributed collaboration and business services sharing across multiple organizations. Meanwhile, Web services can be easily embedded into a Grid system for executing a real task with state and versioning information management. Since Autonomic computing (Kephart, 2003) is proposed to address the self-management issue of an infrastructure, we can use its capabilities of self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing and self-protection to build solution components at almost every level of the enterprise infrastructure. For example, we can create intelligent business solution components powered by autonomic capabilities and manage the whole e-business infrastructure using autonomic computing policy. The convergence and collaboration of these three major emerging technologies, namely Web services, Grid computing and Autonomic computing, will pave a way for building a reliable and adaptive e-business infrastructure for intelligent enterprise.