Supporting process control in business collaborations

Business collaborations have become highly dynamic and flexible. "Black-box" services are gradually replaced by services where service providers not only expose the underlying processes but also allow some monitoring of their executions. In this paper, we explore the next step where the consumers can exercise some control over the process execution. We specify a set of control primitives that can be used to exert control on activities before, during and after their execution and on the complete process itself. Our design approach allows the consumer to observe the state of execution of the process and its activities, control their execution and decide how to deal with unsuccessful executions. We describe the support that must be provided in the internal process specification of the service provider for the control options. We illustrate our approach with an example from the healthcare domain.

[1]  Jim Gray,et al.  Notes on Data Base Operating Systems , 1978, Advanced Course: Operating Systems.

[2]  D. Hollingsworth.  The workflow Reference Model , 1994 .

[3]  Zoran Milosevic,et al.  On expressing and monitoring behaviour in contracts , 2002, Proceedings. Sixth International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing.

[4]  Alex Norta,et al.  Exploring Dynamic Inter-Organizational Business Process Collaboration , 2008 .

[5]  Lai Xu.  Monitoring multi-party contracts for E-business , 2004 .

[6]  Jochem Vonk,et al.  An analysis of contractual and transactional aspects of a teleradiology process , 2008 .

[7]  Rik Eshuis,et al.  Constructing customized process views , 2008, Data Knowl. Eng..

[8]  Paul W. P. J. Grefen,et al.  An analysis of web services support for dynamic business process outsourcing , 2006, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[9]  Karl Aberer,et al.  CrossFlow: Cross-Organizational Workflow Management in Dynamic Virtual Enterprises , 2000 .

[10]  Mike P. Papazoglou,et al.  Web Services - Principles and Technology , 2007 .

[11]  A. Norta,et al.  Dr aft V ers ion A Reference Architecture for Dynamic Inter-Organizational Business Process Collaboration , 2007 .

[12]  Sushil Jajodia,et al.  Advanced Transaction Models and Architectures , 2012, Springer US.

[13]  Wil M.P. van der Aalst,et al.  Patterns for process-aware information systems : an approach based on colored Petri nets , 2004 .

[14]  Gustavo Alonso,et al.  Web Services , 2004, Data-Centric Systems and Applications.

[15]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Resource Patterns: Identification, Representation and Tool Support , 2005, CAiSE.

[16]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management , 1998, J. Circuits Syst. Comput..

[17]  Paul W. P. J. Grefen,et al.  A Three-Level Framework for Process and Data Management of Complex E-Services , 2003, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[18]  Paul W. P. J. Grefen,et al.  The business case for B2B e-contracting , 2004, ICEC '04.

[19]  Paul W. P. J. Grefen,et al.  A Taxonomy of Transactional Workflow Support , 2006, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[20]  van der Wmp Wil Aalst,et al.  Workflow control-flow patterns : a revised view , 2006 .

[21]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Process Flexibility: A Survey of Contemporary Approaches , 2008, CIAO! / EOMAS.

[22]  Nathaniel Palmer,et al.  Workflow Management Coalition , 2009, Encyclopedia of Database Systems.