ABBA: An architecture for deploying business-to-business electronic commerce applications

An efficient design process for developing B2B EC applications is critical for numerous reasons, namely: (i) the complexity and the growth of this category of EC, (ii) its differences from other categories in many aspects, and (iii) the number of existing approaches and standards causing confusion to enterprises willing to deploy B2B EC applications. In this paper, we first analyze and compare existing architectures, reference models, approaches, standards and languages used to deploy B2B EC applications. In the light of this analysis and a specification of B2B EC requirements, we propose ABBA, a comprehensive architecture, and a corresponding design process. ABBA is a layered architecture with four interfaced abstraction levels: business model and business process, business process decomposition and distribution, supporting services, and integration technology. ABBA aims at making a common view of the business process independent from the implementing technology, and providing guidelines for a design process to develop comprehensive, interoperable and scalable B2B EC applications.