Distributed architecture for e-business communities
Evolving e-business technologies increasingly enable organisations to participate in different types of network forms or in electronic markets with previously unidentified trading partners. On the other hand, intensive competition, faster technological changes along with more specialised markets have emerged, leading to partnerships incorporating small firms to maximise their flexibility and responsiveness. The LAURA project explored the challenges of constructing a distributed e-business architecture. The aim was to increase the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from the less favoured regions of Europe. As part of the new business models, highly dynamic virtual organisations comprise a short-lived cluster of partnering organisations formed upon demand to meet identified business opportunities. This approach results in a flexible topology for virtual business formations. Furthermore, it bridges the gap between isolated 'islands' and forms an extended business-to-business grid that widens the possibilities for collaboration. Bringing together best practices and standards for e-business with local business knowledge, project partners created an efficient and trusted e-business environment suitable for SMEs. It provides a modular set of services which together form the LAURA Business Collaboration Service and can be embedded into various business-to-business software systems of advanced SMEs. This framework establishes a collaboration model based on a two-step selection of business partners. Firstly, the most suitable candidates are selected from all available peers using metadata and historical business transaction data, and then the search for products and services is forwarded to the selected peers. The discovery of peers is encapsulated into a generic interface which allows different techniques based on peer-to-peer technology and a Java implementation of JXTA protocols. Basic functionalities for enterprise automation (user registration, catalogue management, business transaction monitoring and reporting) are provided by the open source framework of Open for Business project (OFBiz). The development of the prototype e-business system for participating SMEs in United Kingdom, Greece, Germany and Bulgaria was undertaken with a view to gauge the viability of using it to support collaboration for virtual organisations. The results of its full regional and inter-regional implementation are expected to help illustrate its strengths and weaknesses, and provide direction for future research.
