ABBA: an architecture for deploying business-to-business electronic commerce applications

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Abstract

An efficient design process for developing B2B EC applications is critical for numerous reasons, namely: (i) the complexity and the growth of this category of EC, (ii) its differences from other categories in many aspects, and (iii) the number of existing approaches and standards causing confusion to enterprises willing to deploy B2B EC applications. In this paper, we first analyze and compare existing architectures, reference models, approaches, standards and languages used to deploy B2B EC applications. In the light of this analysis and a specification of B2B EC requirements, we propose ABBA, a comprehensive architecture, and a corresponding design process. ABBA is a layered architecture with four interfaced abstraction levels: business model and business process, business process decomposition and distribution, supporting services, and integration technology. ABBA aims at making a common view of the business process independent from the implementing technology, and providing guidelines for a design process to develop comprehensive, interoperable and scalable B2B EC applications.

Section snippets

Motivation

Electronic commerce (EC) is the ability to conduct business transactions via respective services and protocols (e.g., WWW, EDI, XML, HTTP and SOAP) of the Internet and VAN (Value Added Networks). EC is generally broken down into categories depending on the roles of the actors (e.g., business, customer, administration and employee). The well-known categories are business-to-consumer (B2C), which is selling goods and services directly to consumers; and business-to-business (B2B) which is related

Approaches for B2B EC applications

This section investigates, analyses and compares (with respect to our goals) successively current architectures, reference models, approaches, standards, and domain-specific languages for B2B EC.

Desired properties and requirements of B2B EC

The concepts of business process, business model, B2B process, coordination artifacts, B2B applications and systems, and their requirements are of paramount importance for ABBA architecture. They are specified in this section.

Architecture of designing B2B applications

In the light of: (i) the study of some representative architectures, reference models, standards and languages, (ii) the definition of main concepts of B2B EC, and (iii) the specification of the desired properties and requirements of this growing category of EC, we propose ABBA, a comprehensive architecture which aims mainly at deriving an efficient design process (towards a methodology) for deploying B2B EC applications.

Design process

This section explicitly details the design process (Fig. 11) in accordance with ABBA.

Conclusion

The goal of this work is to propose a comprehensive architecture for deploying B2B applications and systems. This architecture aims at: (i) making the business process (crossing the boundaries of the organization) independent from the implementation and integration technologies, in order to get a specified agreed-upon business process; and (ii) providing guidelines for an efficient design process to reduce the complexity of this kind of deployment.

For this purpose, current contributions such as

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