حمایت از بهینه سازی روابط تجارت الکترونیک بنگاه به بنگاه

Much current e-commerce subscribes to very simple interaction models. Many of the potentialities of e-commerce are identical to those that have been under study for some time in the field of automated workflow management systems. In this paper, we describe a new workflow interoperability model, the monitored–nested model (MNM), and show that it can support optimized, extended e-commerce transactions that are not supported by current models. Like other interoperability models, MNM is dependent on process activities, and thus is brittle under real-world conditions of process evolution. This is overcome by augmenting the model with goal-based meta-data and the use of a coordination inferencing algorithm.

Recent studies by technology consulting groups predict more than one fourth of all business to business (B2B) purchases will be transacted on the Internet by 2004—a dollar volume 10 times that of Internet consumer purchases. The explosion in Internet-based B2B is driven by economics—the Internet offers the potential for reduced prices for goods and reduced transaction costs, but this is not simply derived from the Internet as a communications infrastructure. The capability for (relatively) inexpensive electronic B2B communications has existed for some time in highly evolved form, as witnessed by EDI. Newer, Internet based e-marketplaces as they are currently conceived overcome some of the problems encountered with traditional EDI, and constitute essentially a better–cheaper-EDI. As business-to-business e-commerce moves closer to its full potential, it will progress beyond a better–cheaper-EDI to the support of business relationships that match or exceed the dimensionality of non-electronic relationships. However, support and optimization of such relationships require more sophisticated models of interaction than those currently in use.

Many of the problems and the potentialities of e-commerce are identical to those that have been under study for some time in the field of automated workflow management systems. As e-commerce evolves, the relationships between agents supported by the underlying technology must also evolve. In the workflow community, the study of relationships between autonomous workflows and the technology to model and enact them is termed interoperability modeling. We have shown that common interoperability models are not sufficient to realize more complex commercial relationships, which involve multiple parties and provide for considerable exception handling. The monitored–nested model of workflow interoperability we developed enables considerable flexibility and is sufficient for our proposed benchmark scenarios. Goal data about the processes, when structured in a hierarchy that reflects the design of the process, can be interpreted by a workflow subsystem to overcome some of the practical problems that attend sophisticated interoperability models. The advent of multiple interoperable XML-based repositories on the Internet greatly extends the possibilities for augmenting basic inter-organizational workflow architectures with meta-data. Once research such as ours has established the type of information required to enable a rich business relationship, an XML description of that data can be posted to a globally accessible repository and downloaded by any trading partner. In many instances, similar to our technique for enabling contractor–subcontractor relationships with an overlay to conventional process descriptions, the additions to current systems can be made incrementally. A HOPI aware subsystem can be implemented as a middleware shell around any commercial WfMS which supports the Wf-XML standard. In the same way, new e-commerce potentialities can be explored and evaluated, and the support technology debugged without large investments or disruption to existing processes.