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Fig. 9
Intentional alignment
of component vendor with
supply chain
Assure price and
service
Minimize
material types
Assure supplier
Assure Market
Stock parts of all
specifications
Stock parts of
different quality
Do delivery at
customer site
Thus, as shown in Fig.
8,
goals of the component supplier are aligned to those of the
supply chain.
It can be seen that alignment is a vertical property; the goals of the collaborative
system are at a higher level than those of the collaborating systems and it is neces-
sary for the latter goals to become part of the goal decomposition hierarchy of the
former.
Now consider the next step. Intentional interoperability considers interaction of
collaborating systems at the level of intentional goal hierarchies. Consider the hier-
Assure market
of Fig.
8
and constitutes a point of collaboration. The former is look-
Assure supplier
of the former is related to
Assure market
of the latter.
Now we can move to the process level and follow step (d).
4 The Process Level
In this section we consider alignment and interoperability at the process level by
following steps (d) and (e) of the development method. We shall assume that for
the user, supplier, and component supplier respectively, the process model is well
aligned to their respective goal hierarchies. The process models of each of these are
The representation system used has been elaborated in
[23]
. The basic idea is to
represent the process model as a graph whose:
•
Nodes are in the form <argument, action>. This corresponds to the notion of a
signature found in object orientation and identifies the arguments on which the
action occurs.
•
Edges between nodes are directed and represent a successor-predecessor rela-
tionship between nodes. The properties of the edge are given by two properties,
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