Developing collaborative commerce systems based on role-driven components

Abstract

As business organizations are struggling to compete in global market, they focus on the efficient sharing of information on design, development, production, distribution, and procurement, throughout their whole life cycles in global network-driven collaborative environment. To meet the organization’s demands, collaborative commerce (c-commerce) has been recently emerged as a dominant philosophy. Companies are compelled to adopt this paradigm to sustain a competitive edge. C-commerce demands a variety of collaborative interactions among multiple stakeholders.

In order to develop c-commerce systems, this dissertation proposes a role-driven component-oriented methodology (RCOM). RCOM adopts two key modeling perspectives: role and component. The role-driven perspective focuses on capturing business requirements for a c-commerce community by defining the roles of stakeholders and their collaborative relationships. The roles are determined in the light of core competences and then, on the basis of these roles, the business requirements for the collaborative interactions can be analyzed in a systematic fashion. On the other hand, the component-oriented perspective focuses on the consistent and systematic development of the component artifacts required in implementation. It can help shift captured roles to the adaptable components in a seamless manner. RCOM consists of four phases: collaboration analysis, component analysis, component design, and implementation. Because the roles can help implement well-defined business functions, and the components enable the production of reusable artifacts systematically, RCOM can help improve the system development process.

In addition, a development support system (C-Workbench) with meta-data schema is developed for implementing the c-commerce artifacts from RCOM. This can reduce the development cycle time and thus enhance marketability. To demonstrate the practical usefulness of the methodology and the C-Workbench, a real-li...