Provides a comprehensive review of the most recent advances in agent and Web service technologies. Provides an integrated view of the most recent contributions that support formation, integration, collaboration, and operation in virtual enterprise. Presents examples of applications of these technologies throughout various aspects of the virtual enterprise life cycle.

Are you just an ordinary person who has always dreamed of doing something extraordinary? Then this is the book for you. Russell Mendivil is a middle-aged dad, gardener and couch potato with a history of heart attacks who, after a medical scare with his oldest daughter, decides to ride his bike 585 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles to help raise awareness and money for AIDS services. Despite the many physical and emotional struggles Russ faces in preparation for the ride, he remains inspired by the amazing people he meets along the way. This very witty yet touching story serves to prove that if he can do it, so can you.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International IFIP Workshop on Autonomic Communication, WAC 2004, held in Berlin, Germany in October 2004. The 18 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers and 3 panel summaries were carefully reviewed and selected from 45 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on network management; models and protocols; network composition; negotiation and deployment; immunity and resilence; and meaning, context, and situated behaviour.

A comprehensive guide to well-known workflow patterns: recurrent, generic business process constructs, described from the control-flow, data, and resource perspectives. The study of business processes has emerged as a highly effective approach to coordinating an organization's complex service- and knowledge-based activities. The growing field of business process management (BPM) focuses on methods and tools for designing, enacting, and analyzing business processes. This volume offers a definitive guide to the use of patterns, which synthesize the wide range of approaches to modeling business processes. It provides a unique and comprehensive introduction to the well-known workflow patterns collection—recurrent, generic constructs describing common business process modeling and execution scenarios, presented in the form of problem-solution dialectics. The underlying principles of the patterns approach ensure that they are independent of any specific enabling technology, representational formalism, or modeling approach, and thus broadly applicable across the business process modeling and business process technology domains. The authors, drawing on extensive research done by the Workflow Patterns Initiative, offer a detailed introduction to the fundamentals of business process modeling and management; describe three major pattern catalogs, presented from control-flow, data, and resource perspectives; and survey related BPM patterns. The book, a companion to the authoritative Workflow Patterns website, will be an essential resource for both academics and practitioners working in business process modeling and business process management.

Processes and Foundations for Virtual Organizations contains selected articles from PRO-VE'03, the Fourth Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Lugano, Switzerland in October 2003. This fourth edition includes a rich set of papers revealing the progress and achievements in the main current focus areas: -VO breeding environments; -Formation of collaborative networked organizations; -Ontologies and knowledge management; -Process models and interoperability; -Infrastructures; -Multi-agent approaches. In spite of many valid contributions in these areas, many research challenges remain. This is clearly stated in a number of papers suggesting a new research agenda and strategic research roadmaps for advanced virtual organizations. With the selected papers included in this book, PRO-VE pursues its double mission as a forum for presentation and discussion of achievements as well as a place to discuss and suggest new directions and research strategies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Electronic Commerce, WELCOM 2001, held in Heidelberg, Germany in November 2001. The 17 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on trade and markets, security and trust, auctions, profiling, and business interaction.

Business-to-business (B2B) integration is a buzzword which has been used a lot in recent years, with a variety of meanings. Starting with a clear technical definition of this term and its relation to topics like A2A (Application-to-Application), ASP (Application Service Provider), A2A, and B2C (Business-to-Consumer), Christoph Bussler outlines a complete and consistent B2B integration architecture based on a coherent conceptual model. He shows that B2B integration not only requires the exchange of business events between distributed trading partners across networks like the Internet, but also demands back-end application integration within business processes, and thus goes far beyond traditional approaches to enterprise application integration approaches. His detailed presentation describes how B2B integration standards like RosettaNet or SWIFT, the application integration standard J2EE Connector Architecture and basic standards like XML act together in order to enable business process integration. The book is the first of its kind that discusses B2B concepts and architectures independent of specific and short-term industrial or academic approaches and thus provides solid and long-lasting knowledge for researchers, students, and professionals interested in the field of B2B integration.