Collaboration of Design and Manufacturing Using Web Service

Efforts from diverse domains are made to use the Web as a platform of integration for all service components. Design and Manufacturing (D & M) process area being no exception. Leading manufacturing companies recently have announced plans for web-based systems to coordinate transactions with their suppliers. If the design, production and delivery of products have to be done in collaboration with corporate departments, suppliers, resellers and customers, potential manufacturing partners should be identified, and design activities and production plan should be carried out concurrently based on the design requirements and manufacturing constraints. Such process involves many complex tasks, and each task can be either performed in the same organization, of be outsourced. The recent developments in IT technology, specifically e-business are useful to coordinate these activities. However, current e-business tools tend to focus on transactions involving standard parts and products among network of suppliers. Therefore, e-business tools require research focusing on creating business processes from composite Web services, and executing processes that can interact with both internal and external Web services. This study looks into creation of a service from composite Web services using Orchestration and Choreography offered by Web services. Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) or BPEL (for short) was used to orchestrate and choreograph a Die Design and Manufacturing process, in which four Web Services were involved (viz. Die Casting Buyer, Die Manufacturer, Die Design Analyzer, and Casting Manufacturer). The combined process can also be used as a Web Service for further use. Collaboration was achieved in the above said Design and Manufacturing process using Java based, open domain software tools such as Apache Tomcat, Apache AXIS, and Parasoft BPEL Maestro. Key words: Design and Manufacturing, Web service, World wide Web Consortium.