Abstract

Collaborative commerce (C-Commerce) is a set of technologies and business practices that allows companies to build stronger relationships with their trading partners through integrating complex and cross-enterprise processes governed by business logic and rules, as well as workflows. Business Process Management (BPM) is a key element of C-Commerce solutions for complex process coordination. It provides a mechanism to support e-businesses in modeling, deploying, and managing business processes that involve various applications with greater flexibility. Traditional BPM solutions often lack the capability to integrate external applications in that they have very limited support for interoperability. In recent years, Web services have emerged as a promising enabling technology for BPM in support of C-Commerce. Web services offer effective and standard-based means to improve interoperability among different software applications over Internet protocols. This paper aims to give an in-depth analysis of BPM and Web services in the context of C-Commerce. We propose an architecture for Web services enabled BPM in C-Commerce and provide technical insights into why Web services can enhance business process coordination. Finally, an implementation of a dynamic e-procurement application based on the proposed architecture is presented. With the advent of Web service standards and business process integration tools that support them, BPM systems enabled by Web services are empowering the development of more flexible and dynamic C-Commerce.

Keywords: Collaborative commerce; Business process management; Web services; Enterprise application integration; Interoperability

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Collaborative commerce

2.1. The vision of C-Commerce

2.2. Business process management in C-Commerce—no process integration, no collaboration

2.2.1. Workflow management systems

2.2.2. ESS and EAI products

2.2.3. B2B integration servers

3. Web services for business process management in C-Commerce

3.1. The role of Web services in C-Commerce

3.2. A model of Web services supported C-Commerce

4. A Web services enabled BPMS architecture for C-Commerce

4.1. Process modeling tool

4.2. Process management tools

4.3. Business process execution engine

4.4. Business rule engine

4.5. Messaging services

4.6. Web services registry

5. A case study: building a dynamic, Web services enabled e-procurement system

5.1. The scenario of a dynamic e-procurement system

5.2. The implementation of the prototype

6. The adoption of Web services-enabled BPMS for C-Commerce in organizations

7. Conclusion

References

Vitae