Cross-Organizational Workflow Management - General approaches and their suitability for engineering processes

Cross-organizational workflow management deals with the need for transparent and controlled process automation across organizational boundaries. Cooperation between manufacturers and suppliers in the field of engineering requires coupling of parallel workflows of autonomous organization units. So far, several approaches with different architectures exist but they address this field of application differently. This paper presents some requirements of cross-organizational workflow management in the engineering domain by using an application scenario. Existing research approaches are classified distinguishing used specification schemata and expressiveness concerning cross-workflow dependencies. We describe a new approach in a class that matches the presented requirements.

[1]  Daniel Moldt,et al.  Enacting interorganizational workflows using nets in nets , 1999 .

[2]  Paul W. P. J. Grefen,et al.  An architecture for cross-organisational business processes , 2000, Proceedings Second International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-Based Information Systems. WECWIS 2000.

[3]  Andrzej Cichocki,et al.  The collaboration management infrastructure , 2000, Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Data Engineering (Cat. No.00CB37073).

[4]  Peter Dadam,et al.  THE WEP MODEL: ADEQUATE WORKFLOW-MANAGEMENT FOR ENGINEERING PROCESSES , 1998 .

[5]  Markus Kradolfer,et al.  Market-based workflow management for supply chains of services , 2000, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[6]  Ludwig Nastansky,et al.  From Islands to Flexible Business Process Networks - Enabling the Interaction of Distributed Workfiow Management Systems , 1997, ECIS.

[7]  Gustavo Alonso,et al.  The WISE approach to Electronic Commerce , 2000 .

[8]  Norbert Ritter,et al.  Applying ECA-Rules in DB-based Design Environments , 1998, CAD.

[9]  Heiko Ludwig,et al.  Virtual enterprise co-ordinator - agreement-driven gateways for cross-organisational workflow management , 1999, WACC.

[10]  Christoph Bussler.  Enterprise-Wide Workflow Management , 1999, IEEE Concurr..

[11]  Yutaka Matsushita,et al.  Interworkflow system: coordination of each workflow system among multiple organizations , 1998, Proceedings. 3rd IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (Cat. No.98EX122).

[12]  Fabio Casati,et al.  An open, flexible, and configurable system for service composition , 2000, Proceedings Second International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-Based Information Systems. WECWIS 2000.

[13]  Wolfgang Deiters,et al.  Modelling Inter-Organizational Processes with Process Model Fragments , 1999, Enterprise-wide and Cross-enterprise Workflow Management.