A framework-based approach to building private trading exchanges

The private trading exchange (PTX) is emerging as the cornerstone of business-to-business e-commerce. At its core a private trading exchange involves interenterprise integration and collaboration. Our main objective in this paper is to introduce a versatile application platform for building private trading exchanges. This platform supports the management and execution of multienterprise business processes and collabarations in the context of these processes. We review the business requirements of PTX-based systems and the technical challenges in developing such systems. We then examine and categorize the main interaction patterns between the private trading exchange and its participants. These patterns lead to the design of a component framework for process brokering and content aggregation. This framework is the foundation of our application platform for building PTX solutions. We describe the platform and discuss how to use it to implement a PTX solution.