Supporting optimization of business-to-business e-commerce relationships

Much current e-commerce subscribes to very simple interaction models. Many of the potentialities of e-commerce are identical to those that have been under study for some time in the field of automated workflow management systems. In this paper, we describe a new workflow interoperability model, the monitored–nested model (MNM), and show that it can support optimized, extended e-commerce transactions that are not supported by current models. Like other interoperability models, MNM is dependent on process activities, and thus is brittle under real-world conditions of process evolution. This is overcome by augmenting the model with goal-based meta-data and the use of a coordination inferencing algorithm.