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Abstract

Speeding up knowledge-intensive core processes in engineering and increas-ing the quality of their results is becoming more and more decisive, since economic pressure from national and international competitors and customers is rising. In particular, these demands exceed the organizational and infrastructural capacities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) by far. Hence, combining complementary core competencies across organizational boundaries is crucial for an enterprise's continuing success. Efficient and economically reasonable support of knowledge-intensive core processes in virtual organisations is therefore a predominant requirement for future IT infrastructures. The paradigm shift to service-orientation in Grid middleware opens the possibility to provide such support along the product lifecycle by employing a flexible software development approach, namely to compose applications from standard components, promising easier development and modification of Grid applications. In this paper, a service-oriented Grid computing approach is presented which aims at supporting distributed business processes in industry (see section 2 for industrial scenarios) from top level modelling, workflow design and exe-cution to actual Grid service code (presented in section 3). Parts of this gap between processes and code can be bridged by semi-automatically generated Grid service code. Orchestration of these Grid services is also automated by using a Grid-enabled workflow engine (see section 3). The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated by presenting an exemplary process chain from the casting industry (see full paper).