| As e-commerce has grown in larger scale and wider range of more application types, there necessarily needs a new e-commerce service platform (E-Commerce Service Platform, ECSP), which can offer a variety kinds of E-Commerce Software-as-a-Service (EC-SaaS) applications, and tenants in different roles may rent these applications to develop their e-commerce business. Whereas to achieve an e-commerce business goal generally demands multiple tenants to work together cooperatively, which requires the applications rented by these tenants in ECSP must be connected collaborativelly to perform the expected functionalities.The ECSP is a PaaS platform, which not only can assemble all types of EC-SaaS applications rental for different tenants, but also has the powerful capabilities to support the collaboration and customization of EC-SaaS applications. With the support of ECSP, EC-SaaS application developers may not care about the technical details of applications how to achieve collaboration, only in accordance with the requirements specification of collaborative capabilities described by ECSP to focus on EC-SaaS applications with their business logic and the collaborative ways with other business, while the specific details of implementation technology is provided by the platform. After an EC-SaaS application was deployed to the ECSP, it will be ready for multi-tenancy and ready for customizing its collaboration capabilities for each of its tenants. When a tenant rents an EC-SaaS in ECSP, the only work to do is to specify the needs of the collaboration capabilities and the collaborative ways for the EC-SaaS, then the EC-SaaS can perform the collaborative tasks together with other EC-SaaSs rented by other tenants. Thus, the developers and tenants of EC-SaaS applications can leverage the strong abilities offered by ECSP, efficiently and effectively to build many types of e-commerce collaborative applications to support enterprises to develop their full e-commerce business.The discussed demand above significantly challenges the support and service abilities of ECSP. At first, ECSP can support how many types of business and business collaboration manners, and how to define and describe these collaborative business requirements; Secondly, how to support the development of EC-SaaS applications, so that the EC-SaaS can be of the required collaboration capabilities, and how to describe their collaboration capabilities in ECSP; Again, how to support the tenants of EC-SaaS applications, so that they can customize the capabilities and the manner for collaboration to meet the e-commerce collaborative needs from different tenants and their partners; Finally, how to execute these types of collaboration between the instances of EC-SaaS applications rented and customized by different tenants to complete the e-commerce collaborative tasks that all tenants expected.To solve the above problems, starting from the collaborative needs between EC-SaaS applications in ECSP, this thesis systematically researched the key issues towards the abilities of ECSP to support the customizable collaboration between EC-SaaS applications in ECSP.Firstly, the collaboration models about the key issues of collaboration and customization of EC-SaaS applications in ECSP were researched in this thesis. A meta-model named CMM (Collaboration Meta-Model) was designed at first, in which the core elements, including Collaboration Subject (CS), Collaboration Feature (CF), Collaboration Point (CP) and Collaboration Pattern (CPat), were defined to desribe the EC-SaaS applications involved in ECSP and their capabilities, actions and interaction relations for the customizable collaboration, respectively. Furthermore, a conceptual model called ECSP-CCAM (Collaboration Customization Architecture Model in ECSP) was also proposed, to define and elaborate the four abilities that the ECSP has for supporting the customizable collaboration between EC-SaaS applications. The four abilities respectively are the ability for e-commerce experts to build business collaborative patterns, the ability for the developer to offer and describe the collaboration capabilities of their EC-SaaS applications, the ability for tenants to customize the collaborative capabilities of their rented EC-SaaS applications, and the ability for ECSP itself to execute the customized collaboration between EC-SaaS applications. Secondly, around a range of issues to be solved, including the ECSP how to provide the four abilities, as well as e-commerce experts, developers and tenants of EC-SaaS applications how to use these abilities respectively to build collaborative applications supporting the full e-commerce among different tenants, the solutions were thoroughly studied and researched in four aspects, as follows detailed.1. The methodology of how to construct Business Collaboration Patterns (BCPs) was studied first. A BCP is used to define and describe the collaborative relations between multiple meta-CSs in business level, and it is a meta-model to build customizable collaborative applications for e-commerce. Based on the CMM, a BCP can be constructed in a hierarchical manner, which means that a Collbaoration Interaction Pattern (CIP) can be constructed with several Collaboration Point Interaction Patterns (CPIPs), a BCP can be constructed with several CIPs, and finally a complex BCP can be constructed with several simpler BCPs. The ability of constructing BCP that ECSP provides may support the above methodology and the classified management for the built collaboration patterns in different levels.2. The methods of how to offer and describe the collaborative capabilities of EC-SaaS applications in ECSP were researched. Through one or more BCPs, a developer may instantiate a collaboration requirement model of an EC-SaaS application from one or more related meta-CSs, and when he implemented these he can describe them in ECSP as customizable collaborative capabilities that his EC-SaaS application provided. And then he can associate his EC-SaaS application with the meta-CSs he had used, to generate a Customizable Collaboration Resolution (CCR), in which his EC-SaaS application was possible to connect with other EC-SaaS applications.3. The operations for tenants to customize the collaborative capabilities of their rented EC-SaaS applications were further elaborated. According to the CCRs that EC-SaaS developers have created, the tenants can simply specify the required capabilities and the ways for collaboration, to generate an Executable Collaboration Resolution (ECR). An ECR may be either a static ECR (sECR) or a dynamic ECR (dECR). In addition, the methods to define the constraints between CFs and CPs in an EC-SaaS application and the algorithms to verify the consistency and correctness of the customization results were both designed.4. The complicated execution mechanisms and monitoring strategies were studied in-depth for collaboration implementation between different instances of EC-SaaS applications that multiple tenants have rented and customized. We firstly designed an event-driven architecture for ECSP to support the collaborative execution between EC-SaaS applications. Then the ECR can be mapped into a CorPN (Correspondence Petri Net), an extended Petri Net, for elaborating the mechanisms of instantiating and executing of sECRs and dECRs. We also designed the algorithms to maintain and update the relative state information between the ECR instances and different instances of components of EC-SaaS applications belonging to different tenants.Finally, A ECSP Architecture (ECSPA) was designed to support the customized collaboration between EC-SaaS applications, and furthermore a prototype was implemented to demonstrate that the ideas and methodologies proposed in this thesis are correct and feasible.The main contributions of this thesis are as follows:1. This thesis expanded out an innovated roadmap for the research of PaaS platforms to address the problem that current PaaS platforms can not support the customizable collaboration between different SaaS applications. The proposed CMM and ECSP-CCAM in this thesis provided a theoretical foundation for this roadmap.2. The presented methodology and mechanism for customizing and executing of collaboration between multiple applications can solve the problem that current multi-tenant software customization techniques limited the customization only being applied in one application, and this extended its research area and will lead it to be applied for a wider range.3. The EDA-based ECSP architecture designed in this thesis enables the EC-SaaS applications to perceive the e-commerce environments at runtime, which can be used for EC-SaaS applications intelligently and actively to performing business contracts and commercial transactions in the future research.4. The methodology of building a BCP can be used to support the domain experts and business people continually to innovate e-commerce business model, and this ability of ECSP can solve the problem occurring in most of existed e-commerce platforms, which can only support the fixed and pre-built business models. |
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