Multi‐model driven collaborative development platform for service‐oriented e‐Business systems

Enterprises need to be responsive to meet dynamic businesses and requirements. Service‐oriented architecture and Web services can improve e‐Business systems to be integrated and flexible. This paper proposes a multi‐model driven collaborative development platform for service‐oriented e‐Business systems. The platform provides engineers/consultants with three views, i.e., business view, process view, and service view to support service‐oriented software engineering, top‐down business design and bottom‐up service composite and development. The views are kept consistent through model‐driven translation mechanisms. The platform employs three models, i.e., service meta‐model, process model and business model to implement the translation. On the platform, business and technical consultants/engineers can use the views designated for their roles to collaborate for a service‐oriented e‐Business system based at the distributed sites of, e.g., IT vendors and their clients. The collaboration is featured with visual development and rapid demonstration. Comparingly, most of the mainstream development environments focus on object‐oriented application development other than service‐oriented business process modeling. The platform has been developed and deployed in an innovation centre to be evaluated by visiting customers.