Abstract
The work we present here is in line with a novel approach for inter-organizational workflow cooperation spanning several organizations without being managed by one physical organization. Our approach consists of three steps: workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection, and workflow cooperation. Hence, to implement a virtual organization it is important to provide a mechanism whereby organizations can advertise their workflow parts, other organizations can look at them and cooperate these with their own workflows. In this paper, we present CoopFlow, a workflow cooperation framework, supporting dynamic plugging and cooperation between heterogeneous workflow management systems (WfMS). Can be connected to CoopFlow any WfMS that is able to invoke external applications (programs, Web services, etc.) and that allows external applications to invoke any step within a workflow it manages. CoopFlow presents many advantages. First, it provides powerful ways for inter-organizational workflow cooperation and code reduction. In fact, partners can change their WfMS without changing the global proxy behaviour. Furthermore, it permits a dynamic interconnection and disconnection of participating organizations. In addition, it preserves the privacy and autonomy of process participants by reducing inter-visibility as tiny as the cooperation needs based on the view principle. Finally, our framework preserves established workflows : participants don’t modify their internal systems. Instead, they have just to implement a proxy to integrate CoopFlow.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, R.: Workflow: An introduction. In: Fisher, L. (ed.) Workflow Handbook. Future Strategies, Lighthouse Point, FL, pp. 15–38 (2001)
Tata, S., Boughzala, I.: Modeling contribution for virtual enterprise support. In: 12th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies, Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, Linz, Austria, pp. 165–170. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2003)
Tata, S., Chebbi, I.: A bottom-up approach to inter-enterprise business processes. In: 13th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies, Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, Modena, Italy (2004)
Chebbi, I., Tata, S., Dustdar, S.: Cooperation policies for inter-organizational workflows. In: Teamware: supporting scalable virtual teams in multi-organizational settings, Symposium on Applications and the Internet, Trento, Italy (2005)
Chebbi, I., Dustdar, S., Tata, S.: The view-based approach to dynamic inter-organizational workflow cooperation. Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal (2005) (forthcoming)
Griffel, F., Boger, M., Weinreich, H., Lamersdorf, W., Merz, M.: Electronic contracting with cosmos - how to establish, negotiate and execute electronic contracts on the internet. In: Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop (1998)
Verharen, E., Papazoglou, M.: Introduction to contracting in distributed transactional workflow. In: Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Science (1998)
Grefen, P., Aberer, K., Hoffer, Y., Ludwig, H.: Crossflow: Cross-organizational workflow management for service outsourcing in dynamic virtual enterprises. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 24, 52–57 (2001)
Alonso, G., Fiedler, U., Hagen, C., Lazcano, A., Schuldt, H., Weiler, N.: Wise: Business to business e-commerce. In: International Workshop on Research Issues on Data Engineering: Information Technology for virtual Enterprises (1999)
Lazcano, A., Alonso, G., Schuldt, H., Schuler, C.: The wise approach to electronic commerce. International Journal of Computer Systems Science & Engineering, special issue on Flexible Workflow Technology Driving the Networked Economy 15 (2000)
Kotok, A., Webber, D.R.: ebXML: The New Global Standard for Doing Business on the Internet. New Riders Publishing (2001)
Christian, B.H.: ebxml: Status, research issues, and obstacles (2002)
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Loosely coupled interorganizational workflows: Modeling and analyzing workflows crossing organizational boundaries. Information and Management 37, 67–75 (2000)
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Process-oriented architectures for electronic commerce and interorganizational workflow. Inf. Syst. 24, 639–671 (1999)
Muth, P., Wodtke, D., Weissenfels, J., Angelika Kotz Dittrich, G.W.: From centralized workflow specification to distributed workflow execution. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 10(2), 159–184 (1998)
van der Aalst, W.M.P., Weske, M.: The p2p approach to interorganizational workflows. In: Dittrich, K.R., Geppert, A., Norrie, M.C. (eds.) CAiSE 2001. LNCS, vol. 2068, pp. 140–156. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Zhao, J.L.: Workflow management in the age of e-business. In: Tutorial at the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, Hawaii (2002)
Hollingsworth, D.: An xml based architecture for collaborative process management. In: Fischer, L. (ed.) Workflow Handbook 2002. Future Strategies, Lighthouse Point (FL), pp. 95–116 (2002)
WfMC: Workflow process definition interface - xml process definition language. document status - 1.0 final draft. Document number wfmc-tc-1025, Workflow Management Coalition (2002)
Ricker, J., Swenson, K.D., Silverstein, M.: Asynchronous service access protocol working draft 01. Standards specification, Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (2003)
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Interorganizational workflows: An approach based on message sequence charts and petri nets. Systems Analysis - Modelling - Simulation 34, 335–367 (1999)
Martin, D.L., Paolucci, M., McIlraith, S.A., Burstein, M.H., McDermott, D.V., McGuinness, D.L., Parsia, B., Payne, T.R., Sabou, M., Solanki, M., Srinivasan, N., Sycara, K.P.: Bringing semantics to web services: The owl-s approach. In: Cardoso, J., Sheth, A.P. (eds.) SWSWPC 2004. LNCS, vol. 3387, pp. 26–42. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Wombacher, A., Fankhauser, P., Aberer, K.: Overview on decentralized establishment of consistent multi-lateral collaborations based on asynchronous communication. In: IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce, and e-Services, pp. 164–170. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chebbi, I., Tata, S. (2005). CoopFlow: A Framework for Inter-organizational Workflow Cooperation. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2005: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE. OTM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3760. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11575771_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11575771_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29736-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32116-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)