AFRICA: Workflow Interoperability Based on XML-Messages

Electronic business relationships over the internet, such as the linking of cross-organizational business processes in virtual supply chains and other scenarios enjoy an increasing interest in the business world. Especially the use of XML as a domain-independent encoding standard for business documents has led to the development of standardized business frameworks, and the development of interoperability mechanisms that support these standards is underway. In this paper we describe an architecture for the support of crossorganizational workflows through XML messages. This architecture has been implemented and tested within the AFRICA1 project at the University of Muenster, Germany. While our work is based upon the emerging Wf-XML standard of the Workflow Management Coalition, it contains a number of significant enhancements that provide a secure, reliable management of global workflow processes.