TRICK B2B marketplace: Create, explore and trade business services for a circular economy

TRICK B2B marketplace goals

The six TRICK business services, namely social assessment, health protection, PEF, PCO, circular assessment, anti-counterfeiting, and future TRICK business services, will establish an ecosystem of services for the circular economy. 

For that purpose, a B2B marketplace is needed in which services for the circular economy can be published by service owners and purchased by manufacturers. The specification of the marketplace is performed in deliverable D4.1. The goal of deliverable D4.1 is to summarise all the needed features for the B2B marketplace in a software architecture in which the functional decomposition assigns features to microservices. Based on the architecture, the development of identified microservices for the B2B marketplace infrastructure.

TRICK business service

A TRICK business service is a microservice that offers information-driven service for a product. From the B2B marketplace perspective, a TRICK business service contains four elements. These four elements are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Elements of a TRICK business service
(Image Credits: BIBA)

The service description contains all the information related to the service. Hereby, the types of information are text in natural language and images. For example, the name of a service is a text in natural language, and the icon of the service is an image that is a blob. The added data needs to be persisted to enable a service search later on. 

Apart from the service description, the executable of a TRICK business service must be orchestrated by the B2B marketplace. The TRICK business service's executable is needed as a Docker container for that purpose. When a user publishes a TRICK business service, the Docker container shall be uploaded to the TRICK Docker registry. Then, the B2B marketplace can start the TRICK business service when the certification process approves the TRICK business service.

The start of a TRICK business service needs a configuration. Common parts of the configuration are credentials to databases, deployment-specific identifiers or client identifiers. This configuration is created by the user while publishing a TRICK business service. The data format is YAML and follows the syntax of a docker-compose file in the second version. This configuration extends the docker-compose file of the overall B2B marketplace. Thus, the deployment and maintenance of the B2B marketplace are scalable independently of the amount of deployed TRICK business services and add-ons. 

The operational data defines instance-specific data in the marketplace. For example, the price or the number of purchases is such information. This information is linked with the service description and is persisted in a database. 

Functionalities provided by the B2B marketplace

Loosely coupled microservices provide the functionalities of the B2B marketplace. There are two types of microservices in the B2B marketplace, namely microservices for the infrastructure and microservice for the service catalogue. The infrastructure microservices are needed to provide all functionality for an empty B2B marketplace. It includes, for example, services for searching and publishing a TRICK business service. The necessary set of infrastructure services is shown in Figure 2. Figure 2 also contains a dotted black rectangle, a placeholder for the available (deployed) microservices for the service catalogue, which are TRICK business services. The amount of deployed business services varies during the operation of the B2B marketplace, and therefore, it needs a dynamic publishing process. The initial setup of the deployed business services is the six TRICK business services shown in Figure 3. 

Figure 2 Architecture of the B2B marketplace
(Image Credits: BIBA)

Figure 3 Initial setup of TRICK business services for B2B marketplace
(Image Credits: BIBA)

The envisaged publishing process adds different types of data into the B2B marketplace to enable the search and the invocation of a TRICK business service.

To read the full deliverables of D4.1, please visit TRICK documents on our website: link