A REA BASED ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING APPLICATION
The conceptual characteristic of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is the transactional recording of business information that relates to the execution of the different business processes within the enterprise value chain. The REA ontology introduced by McCarthy (1982) and extended by Geerts and McCarthy (2002) provides a solid theoretical foundation for ERP systems. In this article the REA based ERP application named "ERP Control" is presented to demonstrate how the REA ontology can be used for the semantic design of an ERP system and its implementation in a web based information technology. In ERP Control the business processes in form of exchange and conversion processes (see Hruby 2006) are designed and implemented according to the REA ontology. The exchange processes obey the duality restriction commanded by the REA ontology by having equally valued resource flows between the involved agents. In the conversion processes the underlying production technology is integrated according to the IEC standard on Enterprise Control System Integration (IEC ECSI 2008) The duality restriction relates to the resources in the conversion process that are consumed and used as input and the resources that are produced as output. The semantic data model of ERP Control is constructed for the exchange and conversion processes according to the REA ontology and it is implemented in a mysql data base. The double entry booking functionality for collecting the transactional business information is implemented as IT service which is invoked during the confirmation task within the business process execution. The IT services of ERPControl are implemented in the business logic layer of a 3 tier IT architecture. The different IT services composing the processes are orchestrated in the Java Process Definition Language (jPDL) within the business process context and they are executed in the Java Business Process Manager (jBPM) engine. For the integration of the graphical user interface, the business logic and the persistence layer of the 3 tier IT architecture the JBoss Seam application framework is used.