WSCPC: An architecture using semantic web services for collaborative product commerce

In collaborative product commerce (CPC), design activities need to be carried out concurrently with the identification of potential manufacturing partners based on the design requirements and manufacturing constraints. This paper presents a web service based CPC framework, WSCPC (web services for CPC). WSCPC integrates design process, business plan, and assembly operations using web services in which a task is regarded as a service that an organization can provide and is outsourced to other companies on the fly. In addition, we propose a service-oriented process model that enables a machine to locate actively a CPC service, to check service capabilities, and to execute collaborative services into an optimized process workflow. Our service-oriented process model is a general drawing to realize functionalities, such as defining CPC service, enacting CPC service, and monitoring the executing status of CPC service. CPC, therefore, can utilize web services to not only discover diverse services of design, manufacturing and logistics, but configure collaborative process design, supporting service oriented CPC within WSCPC framework. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.