Tuple-Based Morphisms for E-Procurement Solutions

The need to collaborate and establish partnerships to reach global business and markets is more common than ever amongst competitive companies, in particular, manufacturers. This need has required that businesses procure their supply needs on a global scale, thus forcing them to interact with a wide variety of potential suppliers coming from various countries. The advent of e-procurement has facilitated the exchange of procurement information amongst suppliers and their clients. However, due to the great variety of different sources of data models and semantics, businesses still face some difficulties exchanging vital information electronically and seamlessly. This situation is even worse with the advent of the evolution of the enterprise systems and applications, whose dynamics result in increasing the interoperability problem due to the continuous need for model adjustments and semantics harmonization. In order to contribute to a long term stable interoperable enterprise operating environment and facilitate the usage of existing and future e-procurement solutions, the authors propose the integration of traceability functionalities in information systems as a way to support such sustainability. Data, semantic, and structural mappings between partner enterprises should be modelled as tuples, and stored in a ‘Mediator Knowledge Base’ for communication support with reasoning capabilities, thus allowing to trace, monitor and support the stability maintenance of a system’s interoperable state. The mapping stored also contains an ATL code expression, which with the aid of model transformation tools, can be utilized to perform the mapping between two different enterprise data models, thus facilitating future automation.