Petri Net Based Behavior Description of Cross-Organization Workflow with Synchronous Interaction Pattern

Today’s workflow systems are crossing organizational boundaries and usually involve multiple organizations or partners, and the cross-organization workflow has received much public attention from both the academia and the industry. This way the property analysis as well as system control for a cross-organization workflow is very important. In this paper, we focus on a kind of loosely coupled workflow architecture with synchronous interaction pattern, i.e. each organization owns its private workflow process and can operate independently, and they need to synchronize through certain tasks. Its behavior description approach is obtained using the synchronized shuffle operation of Petri net language. It is proved that our approach benefits the behavior characterization of cross-organizational workflow with synchronous interaction pattern and can be further used to decide and control the fairness, liveness, deadlock and trap for the cross-organization workflow. A running case of cross-organizational medical diagnosis workflow is given to validate our approaches throughout the whole paper.