An e-contracting reference architecture

Abstract

Business-to-business e-contracting aims at automating the contracting process between companies. It improves the efficiency of the contracting process and enables the introduction of new business models that can be supported by companies. For the development of an e-contracting system, an architecture is required that describes the system components and the communication channels between them. This paper presents a reference architecture for the development of e-contracting systems. The architecture is designed on the basis of a requirement analysis of e-contracting systems. Established architectural principles are used in its design. The architecture can serve as a foundation in the analysis and design of concrete architectures of e-contracting systems. Furthermore, it can be used as a standardization model that facilitates system integration and communication of ideas. Its value for both software architects and business professionals makes it an important tool in the analysis and implementation of e-contracting systems.

A Process Framework for Designing Software Reference Architectures for Providing Tools as a Service

“…Different considerations for evaluating a reference architecture have been proposed [3,7,16]. Avgeriou et al [3] have proposed to evaluate a SRA using scenarios and prototyping.…”

“…The prototyping helps analyze the suitability of the implementation decisions such as platform choices and programming languages for the design decisions incorporated in a SRA. Angelov et al [7,16] have argued that straightforward adoption of architecture evaluation methods such as Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Methods (ATAM) [17] and Software Architecture Analysis Methods (SAAM) [18] is not feasible because: gathering all the stakeholders and generating scenarios for a SRA evaluation may not be possible, there can be a significantly large diversity of stakeholders and the levels of abstractions in the designed components can be quite high. Hence, it is important to identify the most relevant architecture requirements by involving domain experts or domain models and then preparing scenarios by involving a SRA's potential users [7,16].…”

“…One of the most comprehensive and detailed guidelines have been reported by Angelov et al [1,2,7,16]. Their work provides a classification technique of the reference architectures based upon the domain-specific maturity and how the reference architectures are designed.…”

A classification of software reference architectures: Analyzing their success and effectiveness

“…The success of these architectures is hard to estimate. Examples for this specialization of Type 5 architectures are ERA [2], AHA [30], and eSRA [22].…”

“…Table 6. List of studied reference architectures T G1 C1 C2 C3 D1 D2 D3 D4 LS WRM [18] 1 X X X X X X X X 4 OATH [23] 1 X X X x x X X X 3 OSI RM [31] 1 X X X X X X X X 4 HIF [27] 1 X X X X x X X X 3 CORBA [24] 1 X X X X X X X X 4 FORTIS RSA 2 X X X X X X X X 4 IBM PanDOORA 3 X X X X X X x X 3 WMS RA [17] 3 X X -X x --X 1 INAHL [29] 3 X X x X x X X X 2 MS .NET [20] 3 X X X X X X X X 4 ACHMEA RA [13] 4 X X X X X X X X 4 ABN WAA [12] 4 X X x x X X X X 2 ANSI-SPARC [28] 5 X X X X x X X X 3 ERA [2] 5 X X x X x X X XeSRA [22] 5 X X x X x X X X -AHA [30] 5 X X x X X x X XIn Table 6, we list the values for all reference architectures that we studied. A row in the table shows the type that the reference architecture resembles the most (indicated in the "T" column) and its values for each of the sub-dimensions in our framework.…”