The full potential of the Web as a medium for electronic commerce can be realized only when multiple partners in a supply chain can route information among themselves in a seamless way. Commerce on the Internet is still far from being "friction free," because business partners cannot exchange information about their business processes in an automated manner. In this paper, we propose the design for aneXchangeable Routing Language (XRL) using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) syntax. XML is a means for trading partners to exchange business data electronically. The novel contribution of our work is to show how XML can also be used to describe workflow process schemas to support flexible routing of documents in the Internet environment. The design of XRL is grounded in Petri nets, which is a well-known formalism. By using this formalism, it is possible to analyze correctness and performance of workflows described in XRL. Architectures to facilitate interoperation through loose and tight integration are also discussed. Examples illustrate how this approach can be used for implementing interorganizational electronic commerce applications. As a proof of concept, we have also developedXRL/flower, a prototype implementation of a workflow management system based on XRL.

/pdf/xml-based-schema-definition-for-support-of-r6ayzfq6ft.pdf

XML-Based Schema Definition for Support of Interorganizational Workflow

Until now, the lack of adequate formalisms and the corresponding abstractions in software have made it difficult to realize traditional role representations in automated systems. Role models, a relatively new concept in object oriented software engineering, emphasize patterns of interaction. The article shows how role modeling can facilitate agent system analysis and design.

Role modeling for agent system analysis, design, and implementation

Today, the Internet gains more and more attraction even for small companies to contact business partners and to automate cooperation between each other. However, the smaller the company the higher the relative setup costs that are required if the complete process of a commercial transaction is to be supported. We propose COSMOS as an Internet-based electronic contracting service that facilitates commercial partners with offer catalogues, a brokerage service, contract negotiation and signing as well as contract execution. The COSMOS architecture supports these functions in an integrated, unified way. The design and execution of contracts integrates patterns from the CORBA Joint Business Object Facility.

Electronic contracting with COSMOS-how to establish, negotiate and execute electronic contracts on the Internet

Transaction cost theory has often been used to support the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to reduce imperfection in the economic system. Electronic markets and hierarchies have repeatedly been described as solutions to inefficiencies in the organisation of transactions in complex and uncertain settings. Far from criticising this assumption, this paper highlights the limits associated with this application of transaction cost theory that has been prevalent in IS research. Building on the concepts first proposed by Ciborra, the paper argues that information-related problems represent only some of the elements contributing to transaction costs. These costs also emerge due to the interdependencies among the various factors contributing to their growth. The study of the consequences associated with ICT design and implementation, grounded in transaction cost theory, should consider the overall implication associated with the adoption and use of ICT and not only the direct effect on problems associated with information flow, distribution, and management.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.jit.2000066.pdf

Transaction Costs and Information Systems: Does IT Add Up?

Fueled by the growing acceptance of the Web Services Architecture, an emerging trend in application service delivery is to move away from tightly coupled systems towards structures of loosely coupled, dynamically bound systems to support both long and short business relationships. It appears highly likely that the next generation of e-Business systems will consist of an interconnection of services, each provided by a possibly different service provider, that are put together on an "on demand" basis to offer an end to end service to a customer.Such an environment, which we call Dynamic e-Business (DeB), will be administered and managed according to dynamically negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLA) between service providers and customers. Consequently, system administration will increasingly become SLA-driven and needs to address challenges such as dynamically determining whether enough spare capacity is available to accommodate additional SLAs, the negotiation of SLA terms and conditions, the continuous monitoring of a multitude of agreed-upon SLA parameters and the troubleshooting of systems, based on their importance for achieving business objectives.A key prerequisite for meeting these goals is to understand the relationship between the cost of the systems an administrator is responsible for and the revenue they are able to generate, i.e., a model needs to be in place to express system resources in financial terms. Today, this is usually not the case.In order to address some of these problems, this paper presents the Web Service Level Agreement (WSLA) framework for defining and monitoring SLAs in inter-domain environments. The framework consists of a flexible and extensible language based on the XML schema and a runtime architecture based on several SLA monitoring services, which may be outsourced to third parties to ensure a maximum of accuracy.WSLA enables service customers and providers to unambiguously define a wide variety of SLAs, specify the SLA parameters and the way how they are measured, and tie them to managed resource instrumentations. A Java-based implementation of this framework, termed SLA Compliance Monitor, is publicly available as part of the IBM Web Services Toolkit.

Defining and Monitoring Service-Level Agreements for Dynamic e-Business

Based on the specific characteristics and requirements for an adequate electronic commerce system support, this article gives an overview of the respective distributed systems technologies which are available for open and heterogeneous electronic commerce applications. Abstracting from basic communication mechanisms such as (transactionally secure) remote procedure calls and remote database access mechanisms, this includes service trading and brokerage functions as well as security aspects including such as notary and non-repudiation functions. Further important elements of a system infrastructure for electronic commerce applications are: Common middleware infrastructures, componentware techniques, distributed and mobile agent technologies etc. As electronic transactions enter the phase of performance, increasingly new and important functions are required. Among these are: Negotiation protocols to support both the settlement and fulfillment of electronic contracts as well as ad-hoc workflow management support for compound and distributed services in electronic commerce applications. In addition to an overview of the state of the art of the respective technology, the article briefly presents some related projects conducted by the authors jointly with international partners in order to realize some of the important new functions of a system infrastructure for open distributed electronic commerce applications.

/pdf/supporting-electronic-commerce-transactions-with-contracting-10420951ep.pdf

Supporting electronic commerce transactions with contracting services

The diversity of research and development work on agent technology has led to a strong distinction between mobile and intelligent agents. This paper presents an architecture aiming at providing a step towards the integration of these two aspects, concretely by providing an approach of dynamically embedding negotiation capabilities into mobile agents. In particular, the requirements for enabling automated negotiations including negotiation protocols and strategies, a plug-in component architecture for realizing such requirements on mobile agents, and the design of negotiation support building blocks as components of this architecture are presented.

A Plug-in Architecture Providing Dynamic Negotiation Capabilities for Mobile Agents

The dynamic and evolutionary character of open electronic service markets with respect to both the application and the system infrastructure level requires appropriate system support mechanisms in order to dynamically congure business transactions and provide the required support services in e xible and individual ways. This paper proposes the use of policy management mechanisms to support e xible cooperation of applications and dynamic conguration of support services in electronic service markets. It argues that various such policy management mechanisms can be efciently supported generically by a respective common policy management service. Accordingly, the paper presents a generic approach to both policy modeling and policy processing aspects of an open system support platform for electronic service markets.

/pdf/generic-policy-management-for-open-service-markets-12dyogsott.pdf

Generic Policy Management for Open Service Markets

Mit Electronic Commerce wird i. allg. die automatische Durchführung von Handelstransaktionen über Kommunikationsnetze bezeichnet. Bereits seit den 70 er Jahren wurde nach dieser Definition Electronic Commerce auf der Basis des elektronischen Datenaustausches (EDI) betrieben. Daû Electronic Commerce stark an Prominenz gewonnen hat und droht, als Modebegriff überhöht zu werden, liegt insbesondere an der Vielfalt der Anwendungsmöglichkeiten, die sich heute aus dem Zusammentreffen des Internet, preiswerter Hardund Software sowie preiswerter Kommunikationsverbindungen ergeben hat. Eine weitere wichtige Grundbedingung ist die inzwischen weit gediehene Standardisierung von grundlegenden Kommunikationsprotokollen und Sicherheitsmechanismen, die zur Abwicklung von EC-OnlineTransaktionen erforderlich sind. Dabei spielen heute v. a. (natürlich) das WWW, gängige Zahlungsverfahren sowie allgemein unterstützte Verfahren zur Verschlüsselung, Authentisierung und Vertrauensbildung eine wichtige Rolle. Für das Jahr 2000 erwartet die Europäische Kommission ein EC-Weltmarktvolumen von 200 Milliarden Euro (EITO 1999). Im Durchschnitt erwarten Analysten und Marktforscher für die Jahre 2000 bis 2002 ein Volumen von 154,5 Mrd. USD (OECD 1999). Dies sind Durchschnittswerte, die sich aus den Prognosen von 12 Instituten ergeben. Weiteren Analysen zufolge soll sich der Electronic Commerce in Deutschland von 73 Mio. USD (1996/97) über 9.700 Mio. (2000/01) bis zu 16.090 Mio. in den Jahren 2001/02 entwickeln. Für die EU wird im gleichen Zeitraum folgendes Volumen erwartet: 96 Mio. USD, 44.300 Mio. und 64.360 Mio. Da der elektronische Handel naturgemäû über die Grenzen einzelner Organisationen hinweg geführt wird, geht mit der Realisierung von Electronic-Commerce-Systemen immer auch eine Unterstützung durch entsprechende Kommunikationsund Kooperationsprotokolle einher. Es liegt daher in der Natur der Sache, daû bei einer technologisch orientierten Herangehensweise verteilte Systeme und die in ihrem Umfeld bereits vorhandenen Technologien einen wichtigen Ausgangspunkt für die Realisierung von EC-Systemen bilden. Zielsetzung dieses Artikels ist, das komplexe Feld des Electronic Commerce etwas zu strukturieren und dabei Hinweise auf relevante Standards, Technologien und ihre Anwendungsmöglichkeiten zu geben. Dabei liegt in diesem Beitrag der Schwerpunkt im Bereich der dazu

Electronic Commerce Technologische und organisatorische Grundlagen

In this paper, an approach to implement automated auctions as a negotiation mechanism for Business-to-Business electronic commerce applications is presented. It is based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) that evolve FSMs (Finite State Machines). Each of these FSMs represents an auction strategy that competes on the market and is modified over time according to the outcome of this competition by using GA principles. The paper gives an overview of auctions, especially in the Business-to-Business domain, and other work related to this paper. Then, the application of Genetic Algorithms to automate auctions is presented and relevant details on the prototype implementation are given. In addition, some key results obtained from experiments using this implementation are discussed.

M. Tuan Tu

Papers

Supporting electronic commerce transactions with contracting services

A Plug-in Architecture Providing Dynamic Negotiation Capabilities for Mobile Agents

Generic Policy Management for Open Service Markets

Electronic Commerce Technologische und organisatorische Grundlagen

Using Genetic Algorithms to Enable Automated Auctions