Recent research on distributed Internet based B2B e-commerce has focused on long running distributed transactions and the possibility that this characteristic may lead to extended record locking. New standards developed define the terms and condition necessary for businesses to interact in an electronic contract, such as a Trading Partner Agreement (TPA) and therefore do not require record locking. Researchers suggest that B2B e-commerce systems developed using TPAs show a lower degree of coupling between each partner's systems. Although the proceeding statement seems intuitively true, currently there are no metrics that have been shown to theoretically or empirically prove this relationship. The focus of this paper is to provide a set of metrics to measure coupling in B2B architectures. Keywords B2B, e-commerce, Trading Partner Agreements, Coupling
Anthony M. Orme, Letha H. Etzkorn