Morad Benyoucef

From e-commerce to social commerce: A close look at design features

E-commerce is undergoing an evolution through the adoption of Web 2.0 capabilities to enhance customer participation and achieve greater economic value. This new phenomenon is commonly referred to as social commerce, however it has not yet been fully understood. In addition to the lack of a stable and agreed-upon definition, there is little research on social commerce and no significant research dedicated to the design of social commerce platforms. This study offers literature review to explain the concept of social commerce, tracks its nascent state-of-the-art, and discusses relevant design features as they relate to e-commerce and Web 2.0. We propose a new model and a set of principles for guiding social commerce design. We also apply the model and guidelines to two leading social commerce platforms, Amazon and Starbucks on Facebook. The findings indicate that, for any social commerce website, it is critical to achieve a minimum set of social commerce design features. These design features must cover all the layers of the proposed model, including the individual, conversation, community and commerce levels.

Knowledge sharing in dynamic virtual enterprises: A socio-technological perspective

The success of a virtual enterprise depends largely on the effective collaboration of its members in orchestrating their knowledge, skills, core competences and resources, in order to enhance competitive capabilities and respond better to business opportunities. In this paper we address the challenges of knowledge sharing in dynamic virtual enterprises. We take a socio-technological approach by proposing a human-centered knowledge sharing solution and architecture. Specifically, we propose a knowledge resource space model to represent heterogeneous knowledge resources, both explicit and implicit. We then introduce a knowledge sharing community model and adopt an agent based solution to perform the functions of knowledge sharing among members of a dynamic virtual enterprise. Our solution incorporates the concepts of agent society and semantic ontology. Knowledge sharing in dynamic virtual enterprises is performed with three types of ties: knowledge agent to knowledge agent, knowledge agent to knowledge item, and knowledge item to knowledge item. We measure agent-to-agent ties by preference correlation using the contribution degree of one agent to another and the preference similarity degree between two agents. We define a semantic view to show agent-to-item ties and use semantic links in the knowledge resource space model to reflect item-to-item ties. We also elaborate the co-evolution mechanism of collective intelligence across enterprises throughout the lifecycle of a dynamic virtual enterprise. A case study is presented to validate our approach.

Towards the automation of e-negotiation processes based on web services – a modeling approach

E-Negotiation is the process of conducting negotiations between business partners using electronic means. The interest in e-negotiation is motivated by its potential to provide business partners with more efficient processes, enabling them to draft better contracts in less time. Most of today’s e-marketplaces support some form of e-negotiation. Numerous attempts are being made to design e-marketplaces that support more than one negotiation protocol. The main problem in designing these e-marketplaces is the lack of a systematic approach. In our view, the e-marketplace enforces negotiation protocols and therefore should make them available for consultation by humans and for automation by software agents. Separating the protocols from the e-negotiation media is a step towards a configurable e-marketplace. In this paper we address the requirements for modeling e-negotiation protocols. Then we adopt the Statechart formalism as a modeling language and provide descriptions of five commonly used e-negotiation protocols. Finally, we discuss how we move from these Statechart descriptions of the protocols to modeling the interactions between the e-marketplace participants using a web service orchestration language.

Combined Negotiations in E-Commerce: Concepts and Architecture

Combined Negotiations are a novel and general type of negotiation, in which the user is interested in many goods or services and consequently engages in many negotiations at the same time. The negotiations are independent of each other, whereas the goods or services are typically interdependent. Using currently available technology for electronic negotiations, the user conducts each negotiation separately, and has the burden of coordinating and reconciling them. The inherent complexity of combined negotiations in B2C as well as B2B e-commerce calls for software support.In our research, we aim to devise a Combined Negotiation Support System (CNSS) to help the user conduct all the negotiations at the same time. The CNSS enables the user to control and monitor the progress of the negotiations, makes sure that the specified dependencies are respected, and applies user-defined strategy rules. We have designed such a CNSS which we call CONSENSUS. The architecture of CONSENSUS relies on workflow technology, negotiating software agents, and rule engine technology. The originality of this architecture lies in the fact that the user of CONSENSUS models the combined negotiation at build time using a workflow that captures the sequencing of the individual negotiations and the dependencies between them. At runtime, software agents are assigned to individual negotiations, and they participate in the combined negotiation as actors in the workflow. The user can monitor the progress of the combined negotiation as a whole, and the progress of individual negotiations via dedicated graphical user interfaces. We rely on rule engine technology to enable the agents to use negotiation strategies.The paper introduces combined negotiations with a usage scenario. Then, combined negotiations are detailed, along with the approach taken to cope with their complexity. Afterwards, we describe the functionality a CNSS should provide, and present the architecture of CONSENSUS, together with a discussion of the underlying concepts and technologies. Furthermore, we report on our prototype implementation of CONSENSUS and illustrate it with an example. A discussion of related and future work concludes the paper.

An Evaluation of Formalisms for Negotiations in E-commerce

The diversity of negotiation types in e-commerce calls for a clear description of the rules that govern them. The participant has to know the rules before engaging in a negotiation, and to this end, a formalism is needed which allows for the serialization and visualization of the rules. Furthermore, this formal description should be executable, in order to simulate the negotiation process and investigate its compliance with the underlying requirements. As a consequence of such formalization, the negotiation process and the software supporting it may be separated. This paper discusses the requirements for a formalism that is appropriate for capturing negotiation processes. It then presents five major techniques and formalisms for describing such processes and evaluates them according to the requirements. The paper concludes that the Statechart formalism is most suitable for the negotiation types considered.

A conceptual architecture for a combined negotiation support system

In a combined negotiation in e-commerce, the user is interested in many goods or services and consequently engages in many negotiations at the same time. The negotiations are independent of each other, whereas the goods or services are typically interdependent. Using currently available negotiation technology, the user conducts each negotiation separately, and has the burden of coordinating and reconciling them. The authors aim to provide a Combined Negotiation Support System (CNSS) to help the user conduct all the negotiations at the same time. The CNSS will enable the user to control and monitor the progress of the negotiations, and will make sure that the specified dependencies are respected. The architecture of the CNSS relies on workflow technology and on negotiating software agents. The paper starts by presenting the problem and giving an overview of the envisioned CNSS. Then, undertaking concepts and technology are discussed, and the proposed architecture is detailed. The paper concludes with a discussion of related work.

Modeling healthcare processes as service orchestrations and choreographies

Purpose – Service‐oriented architecture is becoming increasingly important for healthcare delivery as it assures seamless integration internally between various teams and departments, and externally between healthcare organizations and their partners. In order to make healthcare more efficient and effective, we need to understand and evaluate its processes, and one way of achieving that is through process modeling. Modeling healthcare processes within a service‐oriented environment opens up new perspectives and raises challenging questions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate one of these questions, namely the suitability of web service orchestration and choreography, two closely related but fundamentally different methodologies for modeling web service‐based healthcare processes.Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a case‐based approach that first developed a set of 12 features for modeling healthcare processes and then used the features to compare orchestration and choreography for mode...

An infrastructure for rule-driven negotiating software agents

Most strategy-enabled automated negotiation platforms use hard-coded, predefined, and non-adaptive negotiation strategies. This is evidently insufficient in regard to the ambitions of automated negotiations research. In this paper, we introduce INSULA, an infrastructure for representing, managing, and exploring negotiation strategies that is versatile, easy to use, and that encompasses a wide spectrum of negotiation types. We treat negotiation strategies as declarative knowledge, and thus we represent them as if-then rules which soft-ware agents can exploit using an inference engine. The first part of the paper examines negotiation strategies and the possibility of using a rule-based approach to represent them. The second part details the architecture of INSULA, and some of the ongoing experimentations.

A mashup based framework for multi level healthcare interoperability

Healthcare delivery is evolving from disease-centered to patient-centered care delivery where patients are active participants in their healthcare delivery. This calls for more communication and collaboration among all healthcare actors. There is also an increasing demand for personalized healthcare systems that provide effective information management, facilitate communication and collaboration, and support applications to meet user requirements. To address these challenges, we need to advance the integration and interoperability of healthcare applications in a controlled manner. Drawing upon a conceptual model from a collaborative care case study, we identified a set of interoperability requirements and developed a Mashup based interoperability framework. Our framework allows patients and other healthcare actors to engage in collaborative processes through online applications facilitated by mashups. We then use proof-of-concept implementations to demonstrate how our framework is able to facilitate different types of interoperability. We believe that collaborative technologies such as mashups can implement process interoperability requirements to support collaborative care delivery, particularly for asynchronous care delivery.

An evaluation framework for business process modeling languages in healthcare

Web services composition is an emerging paradigm for enabling inter and intra organizational integration, and a landscape of languages and techniques for modeling business processes in web service based environments has emerged and is continuously being enriched. With the advent of modeling standards, different business sectors are investigating the options for modeling their workflows. In terms of business process modeling, healthcare is a rather complex sector of activity. Indeed, modeling healthcare processes presents special requirements dictated by the complicated and dynamic nature of these processes as well as by the specificity and diversity of the actors involved in these processes. Little effort has been dedicated to evaluating the capabilities and limitations of modeling languages based on healthcare requirements. This paper presents a set of healthcare modeling requirements and proposes an evaluation framework for process modeling languages based on these requirements. The suitability of two major process based service composition languages, namely BPEL and WS-CDL, is evaluated.