Service-based P2P overlay network for collaborative problem solving

This paper describes a service-based P2P overlay network architecture to support a collaborative environment for solving complex business processes over the network. In the proposed architecture, autonomic service providers corresponding to various activities that occur in the processes reside on the overlay network and are discovered dynamically during the execution of the process. To consummate a specific process, a set of services that map into the business process are federated together and executed in a choreographed sequence. All services have standardized interfaces and this allows any service to be seamlessly replaced with another service without affecting the performance of the federation. The paper presents two cases of application of this architecture, namely, business-to-business collaboration in an engineering environment (General Electric) and multiparty financial transactions (mortgage).