Plug and Play Components for Global Supply Chains

This paper introduces the concept of an electronic trade scenario as an aid to the management of (global) supply chains, and other forms of international, businessto-business electronic commerce. The problem addressed is the following. Competition demands that trade transactions be handled efficiently and securely. However, the same competitive environment also demands flexibility, and the ability to re-design the supply chain as conditions change. Current advances in electronic document technologies, notably XML schemas, ebXML, offer new possibilities for generic, resusable component software at the level of document specifications. Here we address the additional challenge of supporting the rapid re-engineering of the process specifications for the supply chain. For this, we focus on the component technologies for electronic trade scenarios: generic, reusable models of the entire trade transaction. They are stored in a on-line repository, where each member of the supply chain can download the transaction component for their role in the transaction. We describe a CASE tool, called InterProcs, which provides a graphical modeling internface for supply chain process specifications at several levels of abstraction, including Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Documentary Petri Nets (DPN). Once specified, InterProcs auotmatically produces an operating prototyping of the supply chain transaction model. In this paper we address the additional step to production implementation of the prototype supply chain model using distributed component technology. Because we are concerned with open standards, we focus specially on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform. The copyright of this paper belongs to the paper’s authors. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage. Proceedings of the Eighth Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets (RSEEM 01) Maastricht, The Netherlands, September 16-18, 2001 (M. Schoop, R. Walczuch, eds.) http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/conf/rseem2001/ Ronald M. Lee and Jos van Hillegersberg 2 Eighth Research Symposium on Emerging Electronic Markets 2001