Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to inter-organizational workflow cooperation. Our goal is to provide support for organizations which are involved in a shared but not pre-modeled cooperative workflow across organizational boundaries. Our approach allows for partial visibility of workflows and their resources, thus providing powerful ways for inter-organizational workflow configuration. Varying degrees of visibility of workflows enable organizations to retain required levels of privacy and security of internal workflows. Our presented view concept provides a high degree of flexibility for participating organizations, since internal structures of collaborative workflows may be adapted without changes in the inter-organizational workflows. Furthermore, we provide workflow participants with the freedom to change their workflows without changing their roles in the cooperation. This increases flexibility and is an important step to increase efficiency as well as reduction in costs for inter-organizational workflows. The presented approach is inspired by the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Accordingly, our approach consists of three steps: workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection, and workflow cooperation.

Keywords: Inter-organizational workflow; Service-oriented Architecture; Workflow views

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Requirements for inter-organizational workflows

2.1. Flexibility support

2.2. Privacy respect principle

2.3. Established workflow preservation

3. Related work

3.1. Approaches based on workflow interoperability

3.1.1. Capacity sharing

3.1.2. Chained execution

3.1.3. Subcontracting

3.1.4. Case transfer

3.1.5. Loosely coupled

3.1.6. Public-to-private

3.2. Contracting of workflows

3.2.1. CrossFlow

3.2.2. WISE

3.3. Workflow specification languages

3.3.1. Business process execution language for web services

3.3.2. WSDL

3.3.3. WSFL

3.3.4. XLANG

3.3.5. BPML

3.3.6. WSCL

3.3.7. ebXML

3.3.8. WPDL

3.4. Summary of related work vis-à-vis inter-organizational workflows requirements

4. Steps for inter-organizational workflow cooperation

4.1. Step 1: workflow identification and advertisement

4.2. Step 2: workflow interconnection using cooperation policies

4.3. Step 3: workflow cooperation and monitoring using trusted third party

4.4. Cooperation sequence diagram

5. Describing cooperation in inter-organizational workflows

5.1. Running example

5.2. Definitions

5.2.1. Producing cooperative activity

5.2.2. Consuming cooperative activity

5.2.3. Cooperative activity

5.3. Internal, cooperative, and public processes

5.4. Definition process of public processes

5.4.1. Cooperative processes

5.4.2. Public processes

6. Implementation issues

7. Conclusion and future work

Appendix A

A.1. Minimal connected workflow

A.2. Cooperative workflow

A.3. Definition procedure of cooperative workflow

References

Vitae