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Purpose: Inter-enterprise electronic-commerce, more commonly
known as business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce, is expected to become far more important
than the client-to-vendor commerce currently in the news, and its considerably more
complex. To properly support such commerce one needs to ensure compliance with policies
that reflect prior contract that generally exist between enterprises, as well as the
relevant governmental regulations. Such contracts and regulations deal with much more than
the safe transfer of funds, which is the focus of most current research on electronic
commerce, having to cope with complex and long term commercial activities, often
consisting of intertwined multi-stage transactions, involving several participants.
Approach:
The challenge here is:
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to construct a mechanism for the formulation and enforcement of a
wide range of policies for inter-enterprise commerce; and
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to provide for interoperability between such policies, and the
internal policies of the participating enterprises.
We propose to address this challenge through the use of the
concept of law-governed interaction (LGI).
Status:
Professor
Naftaly Minisky discussed key issues in the trustworthiness of
Business-to-Business (B2B) communications at an affiliate meeting of the
New Jersey Center for Software Engineering on June 26, 2001 at Rutgers
University. Twenty-one people attended.
Progress on
making B2B Internet usage reliable and safe is being made. The tools
described at the meeting are availed to New Jersey companies,
individuals and universities.
Professor
Naftaly's research, sponsored in part by the New Commission on Science
and Technology, shows the effectiveness of distributed policies between
enterprises communicating on an extranet. His architecture adds an
interface structure to each enterprise-computing model containing the
policy, called a law (L), and interpretation of the law (I) and the
Control (C) that carries the states of the connection.
A network of
enterprises differs from a collection of components in that there is a
sense of community governed by policies or laws. An ensemble of
components does not necessarily operate within a community. The policies
and structures governing enterprise interactions reduce the
complexity of systems. Reducing complexity increases productivity and
makes
it possible to quickly build and modify extranets
on the fly. Layering is
not a component attribute vital for
networking.
The process of interactions demands a scalable and
expressive mechanism for establishing, meaning to specify and enforce,
and enterprise wide policies. Prof. Minisky has invented a decentralized
'Law Governed Interaction" approach. Decentralization is critical
to assumer scalability. Trusted agents are essential to control the
interpretation of the laws. There is a practical fan-in and fan-out
limit that must be observed to make the interactions timely and avoid
bottlenecks. His approach provides for stateful interactions and thereby
avoids the necessity of building the policies in the components within
an enterprise.
Future work includes:
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Organizing the
policies into hierarchies
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Dynamic modification
of a policy while the community governed by it continues to
operate.
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Studies of Fault
tolerance
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Regulating
peer-to-peer communication, the current model in TCP based with an
embedded client/server model.
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Applications to CORBA
and the JAVA message System (JVS)
Prof. Minisky is eager to
collaborate on applications and extensions of his work. Contact him at
minsky@cs.rutgers.edu
Related
Publications:
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