Karsten Schulz

Facilitating cross-organisational workflows with a workflow view approach

Interconnecting business processes across systems and organisations is considered to provide significant benefits, such as greater process transparency, higher degrees of integration, facilitation of communication, and consequently higher throughput in a given time interval. However, to achieve these benefits requires tackling constraints. In the context of this paper these are privacy-requirements of the involved workflows and their mutual dependencies. Workflow views are a promising conceptional approach to address the issue of privacy; however this approach requires addressing the issue of interdependencies between workflow view and adjacent private workflow. In this paper we focus on three aspects concerning the support for execution of cross-organisational workflows that have been modelled with a workflow view approach: (i) communication between the entities of a view-based workflow model, (ii) their impact on an extended workflow engine, and (iii) the design of a cross-organisational workflow architecture (CWA). We consider communication aspects in terms of state dependencies and control flow dependencies. We propose to tightly couple private workflow and workflow view with state dependencies, whilst to loosely couple workflow views with control flow dependencies. We introduce a Petri-Net-based state transition approach that binds states of private workflow tasks to their adjacent workflow view-task. On the basis of these communication aspects we develop a CWA for view-based cross-organisational workflow execution. Its concepts are valid for mediated and unmediated interactions and express no choice of a particular technology. The concepts are demonstrated by a scenario, run by two extended workflow management systems.

Model Driven Distribution of Collaborative Business Processes

In this paper, we present a top down approach for integrated process modelling and distributed process execution. The integrated process model can be utilized for global monitoring and visualization and distributed process models for local execution. Our main focus in this paper is the presentation of the approach to support automatic generation and linking of distributed process models from an integrated process definition

Architectural issues for cross-organisational B2B interactions

In a world of electronic interconnectivity, concepts for process automation within an organisation need to be extended to support co-operation with customers and partners across organisational boundaries. Current workflow standards provide only limited support to enable this interconnectivity. We propose a model for tiering business processes into the private business processes of organisations and those shared business processes that interconnect them. Private business processes can expose interaction points, and shared processes can link to these points so that an overall business process may span two or more organisations. The interaction points can selectively expose information about the processes and process tasks of an organisation. This paper also shows how these ideas can be supported by a coordinating architecture and describes a prototype that implements the key ideas. The proposed architecture that supports inter-organisational business processes was initially validated in the Vega final demonstration that brought together six different companies in a virtual enterprise. The implementation built upon OMGs Workflow Management Facility Specification concept for inter-workflow management interfaces, incorporated existing workflow management systems, including SAP R/3, and also non-process-oriented systems. Available services were selected at run time according to their capabilities and their availability. Experience from the demonstration with all the involved components showed a dynamic linkage between existing business processes and reliable communication between the business partners.

Towards a Cross-Organizational Workflow Model

In this paper we present a 3-tier workflow model for cross-system and cross-organisational workflow interactions. It allows to model private partner workflows, public workflow views that act as their representatives, and public workflows that interconnect these views in a coalition. With this minimal approach, existing workflows can be re-used for B2B interactions whilst their privacy can be maintained.