A goal-oriented modeling and implementing approach for collaborative product commerce

Collaborative product commerce (CPC) is a kind of virtual organization, which is established to support the collaboration among the product design, product manufacturing, sales, marketing, services and so on. It is a dynamic and collaborative organization in order to respond to requirements of the market. The CPC is built based on the requirements model in which the collaboration relationships among the collaborators are described. This paper uses a goal and agent oriented approach (i* framework) to analyze and model early requirements of the CPC. The collaborators in CPC are treated as strategic actors or agents and collaboration among them are depicted as dependency relationships. The model can be translated into formal language and suitable for automatic analysis that is used to verify early requirements and facilitate formal analysis in later phases. Base on this model, a multi-agent system is established using Jadex (Java Agent Development Framework based on BDI) on which a rational agent layer on top of a FIPA-compliant infrastructure is built up. Using the modeling paradigm of the intelligent agents with mental states in Jadex, collaborative agents are constructed and implemented. An example of an instance of CPC is used to illustrate.