Gmd Report

The workflow concept has been very successful in streamlining business processes by automating the coordination of activities, but has so far been limited to the use within single organizations. Any attempt to distribute workflows among different organizations has to face the problems posed by the complex relationship among autonomous organizations and their services. To address these problems we propose a service-oriented model for cross-organizational workflows. Modeling the workflow execution as a cooperation of services allows different organizations to interact via well-defined interfaces. We further show how the execution can be optimized by selecting services depending on their contribution to quality criteria of the workflow.

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