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1998
This paper describes a flexible distributed transactional workflow environment based on an extensible object-oriented framework built around class libraries, application programming interfaces, and shared services. The purpose of this environment is to support a range of EC-like business activities including the support of financial transactions and electronic contracts. This environment has as its aim to provide key infrastructure services for mediating and monitoring electronic commerce.
Decision Support Systems, 2002
Internet-based electronic commerce is becoming the next frontier of new business opportunities. However, commerce on the Internet is seriously hindered by the lack of a common language for collaborative commercial activities. Although Extensible Markup Language (XML) allows trading partners to exchange semantic information electronically, it does not provide support for document routing. In this paper, we describe various inter-organizational electronic commerce applications and discuss their needs for workflow support. Then, we propose a blueprint for XRL, an Extensible Routing Language that enables routing of commercial documents over the Internet and helps in creating truly intelligent documents. This routing language is simple, yet powerful enough to support flexible routing of documents in the Internet environment. D
E-Business requires that corporate information systems be available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week (24 × 7 operation). Strategic operational significance carries a major technical challenge for architects of such highly available systems−in particular it is critical to devise and implement on-line utilities for continuous maintenance of the system at the highest available performance level. In this paper, we consider the problem of on-line reorganization in object databases supporting workflow engine. We also choose to develop a formal framework for a secure, highly available distributed workflow architecture since interworkflow is anticipated as a major supporting mechanism for Business-to-Business Electronic Commerce. The contributions of this paper are both of theoretical and of experimental nature. We complement our algorithms with encouraging experimental results.
1999
Workflow management systems require advanced transaction support to cope with their inherently long-running processes. The recent trend to distribute workflow executions requires an even more advanced transaction support system that is able to handle distribution. This paper presents a model as well as an architecture to provide distributed advanced transaction support.
Information Systems, 1999
IEEE Transactions on Computers, 1997
Workflow systems are receiving increased attention as they intend to facilitate the operations of enterprises by coordinating and streamlining business activities. The need for automated support and operational models that allow workflow applications to coordinate units of work across multiple servers-according to business defined rules and routes-is becoming critical for the proper management of such activities. In this paper, we describe a Transaction-Oriented Workflow Environment (TOWE) for programming workflow activities. The novelty of our approach resides in the proposed unified abstraction, class libraries, to support workflow activities. The fundamental concept used in the TOWE system is based on the symbiosis of object-oriented programming and interprocess communication concepts. In TOWE, the concurrency abstractions are represented by process objects, active objects acting as processes, which involve asynchronous, location-independent, and application specific process invocations.
Proceedings of the 2000 ACM symposium on Applied computing - Volume 2, 2000
Workflow management systems require advanced transaction support to cope with long running activities. This paper presents a model called the Virtual Transaction to provide transactional support to the workflow applications. This model simplifies the process design and enables the process designer to visualize the transactional regions and ensure correctness when running business processes that integrate related tasks that are executed at different locations. Discussions on how the ACID properties for complex business processes are achieved using this model are presented.
Information Systems, 2000
The Internet's World Wide Web has become the prime driver of contemporary Electronic commerce (E-commerce). Although the emphasis has moved from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) to the Internet, the focus is still on the technology required to exchange information rather than supporting business processes crossing organizational borders. E-commerce is not just about facilitating individual business transactions, it also comprises the management of the causal relations between these transactions. This paper stresses the process aspect of E-commerce by relating it to workflow management. Traditional workflow management systems assume one centralized enactment service and have problems dealing with dynamic changes and local variations. Since Ecommerce is characterized by interorganizational workflows distributed over autonomous business units, these systems tend to be useless in the context of E-commerce. This paper reviews new and existing architectures to enable interorganizational workflow. The presentation focuses on two approaches to partition an interorganizational workflow over multiple business partners. Both approaches are evaluated. One of the key concerns in this paper is the possibility to verify the correctness of the interorganizational workflow. The dynamics of the marketplace, with rapid changing business processes and relationships, underlines the need for verification tools.
Distributed and parallel …, 1995
Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.
Proceedings of CoopIS 97: 2nd IFCIS Conference on Cooperative Information Systems
Workflows are activities involving the coordinated execution of multiple tasks performed by different processing entities, mostly in distributed heterogeneous environments which are very common in enterprises of even moderate complexity. In current commercial workflow systems, the workflow scheduler is a single centralized component. A distributed workflow enactment service on the other hand should contain several schedulers on different nodes of a network each executing parts of process instances. Such an architecture would fit naturally to the distributed heterogeneous environments. Further advantages of distributed enactment service are failure resiliency and increased performance since a centralized scheduler is a potential bottleneck. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a distributed workflow enactment service based on the work given in [12]. Yet by starting with a block structured workflow specification language we avoid the very general set of dependencies and their related problems. In this way it is possible to present a simple algorithm for distributed scheduling of process instances. Further benefits of the approach are the ease in testing and debugging the system and execution efficiency through reduced number of messages.
Towards the knowledge society- …, 2002
The use of electronic commerce is spreading day to day to reach environments that have been rather unexplored until this moment, such as governments and administrations. More and more, administrations offer on-line services to the citizens of their countries or regions. It is becoming necessary to have a mechanism for the formal definition of these on-line electronic services (or e-services). Doing so, we would be able to automatically build systems capable to manage these new e-services. An important feature of e-services is that a workflow can be defined to control their development. These concepts do not only apply to e-government, but also to e-business and e-commerce in general. Early experience on the provision of professional e -services has helped us to take this approach.
2000
Abstract The CrossFlow architecture provides support for cross-organisational workflow management in dynamically established virtual enterprises. The creation of a business relationship between a service provider organisation performing a service on behalf of a consumer organisation can be made dynamic when augmented by virtual market technology, the dynamic configuration of the contract enactment infrastructures, and the provision of fine-grained service monitoring and control.
2002
Process oriented workflow systems and e-business applications require transactional support in order to orchestrate loosely coupled services into cohesive units of work and guarantee consistent and reliable execution. In this paper we introduce a multi-level transaction model that provides the necessary independence for the participating resource managers, eg, local database and workflow servers of organisations, engaging in business transactions composed of interacting web-services.
2005
Abstract Structured business processes are the veins of complex business organizations. Workflows have generally been accepted as a means to model and support these processes, be they interactive or completely automated. The fact that these processes require robustness and clear semantics has generally been observed and has led to the combination of workflow and transaction concepts. Many variations on this combination exist, leading to many approaches to transactional workflow support.
1998
Abstract We describe a flexible transactional workflow environment based on an extensible object-oriented framework built around class libraries, application programming interfaces, and shared services. To enforce coordination in workflow communications and model real-life business applications, the concepts ofobligation'andcontract'are introduced. A contract is a semantic agreement between two or more collaborating workflows in terms of a protocol-oriented specification of obligations.
2006
This paper presents the workflow management systems as a tool for modelling, executing and monitoring e-business processes. The automation of processes and particular the business processes is done by workflow systems. There are two main groups of workflow technologies for the specification and execution of all workflows-choreography languages and orchestration languages. An analysis of the most developed workflow technologies is presented below.
Ibm Systems Journal, 1997
A significant number of companies are reengineering their business to be more effective and productive. Consequently, existing applications must be modified, and new applications must be written. The new applications typically run in a distributed and heterogeneous environment, performing single tasks in parallel, and demanding special transaction functionality for the supporting environments. Workflow-based applications offer this type of capability. In this paper, their principal advantages are derived and set in context to transaction, object, and CASE (computer-assisted software engineering) technology. In particular, a method is proposed to develop these workflow-based applications in a cohesive and consistent way.
2000
We believe a source of dynamic organizational processes poised for exponential growth is B2B electronic commerce. In addition to serving as aggregators of product information, all major electronic marketplaces (i2, Ariba, CommerceOne, et al.) are developing infrastructure for the sharing of business process definitions and the augmentation of inter-organizational workflows. XML frameworks for the global publication of process information are proliferating (RosettaNet, et al.) with the intention of WWW process discovery and automated inter-organizational interaction. Highly influential consortiums of Fortune 500 organizations are introducing standard extensible frameworks for process discovery and automated webbased business process (workflow) interaction (UDDI). Working, practical infrastructure is rapidly being realized to implement the global virtualization of organizations that has been predicted for some time.
Dpd, 1995
Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.
Electronic commerce research, 2002
The World-Wide-Web is fast becoming a crucial medium for electronic commerce. Many companies are now involved in on-line retailing of goods and services to consumers through the Web. In some industries, business partnerships are being fostered in order to broaden the scope of their markets. One example is the telecommunications industry, where changes in business structure, spirited by deregulation, have resulted in alliances amongst different communications providers, including new players like the utilities and entertainment ...
Electronic Markets, 1998
We are presenting a project supported by the DFN-Verein, a registered association, and the German government (BMBF) which is called "Confidential Business Transactions on the Internet". In this project we design and implement an open architecture for supporting business transactions using the Internet confidentially and in a process-oriented way. Furthermore we are developing a generic system which might be used in business to business, business to consumer as well as intra-plant cost allocation. Actually our system is designed for carrying out transactions within closed marketplaces independently of any third party. Financial transactions are accomplished by customer accounts. The open architecture guarantees that the system can easily be extended to cover open marketplaces, e.g. by including any payment systems.