| The purpose of this research was to design an object-oriented model for interorganizational collaborative planning applications in an industrial environment. The model provides a plan for the development of business-to-business electronic commerce applications. Such applications may be categorized as informational, transactional, or collaborative. The focus of the model is collaborative planning. Industrial collaborative planning applications enable manufacturers and their suppliers and customers to mutually benefit from reduced supply chain costs and improved customer service. Such applications are increasingly practical from both a technological and financial viewpoint. Such applications are evermore important due to increasing global competition. The ubiquity of internetworking, using internet protocols, makes such applications affordable to even small businesses despite heterogeneous computing environments. The model was developed using object-oriented methodologies and is depicted using the Unified Modeling Language. Use cases were used to determine the characteristics of existing collaborative planning applications and to describe the resulting abstraction. The design conforms to the 4+1 architectural view, that is, Logical view, Component View, Process View, Deployment view, and Use case view. Since model design is the focus of the study, the Logical and Use case views are more developed than the other views. |
