Soft-Coded Trade Procedures for Open-EDI

Organizations engaging in electronic commerce typically face defining detailed bilateral agreements between business partners. This implies that the setup costs for new electronic linkages can be quite high. There is a growing need to model and to simulate this form of interorganizational interaction to lower these costs. The research presented in this paper contributes to the solution of this problem in three ways: first, by stipulating requirements on representation languages to be used for modeling trade procedures; second, by presenting a common graph-based representation language, Documentary Petri Nets, which satisfies these requirements; and third, by presenting a "soft coding" architecture and protocol for sharing and negotiating trade procedures. A modeling environment that is used for the design and analysis of trade procedures, Case/Open-EDI, is demonstrated for this architecture. A simplified documentary credit procedure provides an example of such a Documentary Petri Net model.