Shared Management of Dynamic Business Process Extensions

The global marketplace becomes more and more competitive, and business organizations need to team up and operate as a virtual enterprise to utilize the best of their resources for achieving their common business goals. As the business environment of an enterprise is highly dynamic, it is necessary to develop a workflow management technology that is capable of handling dynamic workflows across enterprise boundaries. This paper proposes a Workflow Extension Model (WEM) and a dynamic workflow management system of WEM for modeling and controlling the execution of multi-organizational business processes. WEM enables the explicit specification of dynamic properties associated with a business process model. It extends the underlying processes by adding connectors, conditions of application, extension process definition, and rules as its modeling constructs. Using WEM as the underlying model, the paper also describes the workflow engine which is extended by an extension service to trigger extensions during the execution of a workflow process to enforce business rules and policies and to adapt the process model at run-time.