Modeling cooperative work for workflow management

Encyclopedia of Database Systems, 2009

O conte udo do presente relat orio e de unica responsabilidade do(s) autor(es). (The contents of this report are the sole responsibility of the author(s).

2005

In the context of inter-organizational workflows, interactions between partners should be constructive, complementary, and guide the work toward the objective of organizations involved in the workflow. Within our approach, inter-organizational workflow cooperation, which consists of workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection and workflow cooperation, this paper focuses on these cooperation policies one has to define in order to enforce and control interactions between partners' workflows. The cooperation policies integrate the partners' roles as well as their coordination, the dataflows allowed to pass from one partner's workflow to another, and their intervisibility levels. The level of the visibility is used to preserve the partner privacy and know-how and is reduced as tiny as cooperation needs.

Research Issues in Data Engineering, 1999

Due to the popularization of the Internet, cooperative applications are expected to become commonplace on the World Wide Web. We are especially interested in cooperation in temporarily virtual enterprises. This paper introduces a new operator, called coo (Co-Operation Operator), which contributes to a better organization of the interactions between cooperating activities than current workflow operators alone can. After motivating our interest in this operator, we give it a semantics and discuss its feasibility

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on …, 1999

This paper explores an innovative conceptual framework for agent oriented and role based workflow modeling. We view a business process as a collection of autonomous, problem solving agents which interact with others when they have interdependencies. And we model a workflow as a set of relating roles. Roles are defined in term of goals, qualifications, obligations, permissions, protocols, etc. We adopt protocols to govern the interactions among roles. Roles are assigned to agents based on the evaluation of qualification and capabilities. Once a role is assigned to an agent, the agent inherits the obligations and permissions specified in that role. Coordination of workflow is achieved by communication between agents. Moreover, the journal article Internet peer review process is considered as a case study.

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.

Advances in Business Information Systems and Analytics

Modernization is an effective approach to making existing mainframe and distributed systems more responsive to business needs. SOA is an adequate paradigm that allows companies to tap into the business value in their current systems for rapid future changes to the business model. In their research works, the authors focus on the use of SOA to implement Inter-Organizational WorkFlows (IOWF). The goal is to take benefits from SOA advantages like interoperability, reusability, and flexibility to deal with process models flexibly enough. This chapter focuses on specific IOWF architectures: the “chained execution” and the “subcontracting.” First, the authors define Service-Based Cooperation Patterns (SBCP) suitable to these IOWF architectures; a SBCP is defined through three main dimensions: the distribution of services, the control of execution, and the structure of interaction. The second issue of the chapter consists of adaptation and evolution of IOWF process models obeying to the de...

Cooperative design deals with the sharing of interests and resources amongst actors to reach a common purpose. This purpose lays on the development of products through the coordination between information sharing, interactions and knowledge. The research objective is to specify an information system which can support the set of knowledge involved in cooperative design situations with a special focus on conflict management situation. In previous works, a conflict management protocol was proposed and carried out in margin of the design process in which the conflict has appeared. However, several dependencies exist between the conflict management process, the design process and the involved product and organisation data. This paper deals with the notorious problem of workflows integration by proposing mechanisms allowing data integration and control flows during conflict management process.

2006

In a virtual organization, different business partners (individual organizations) cooperate in order to achieve a common goal. The coordination of the corresponding inter-organizational workflow is an important issue. In this paper an approach towards managing the operational embodiment of a manufacturing consortium is presented. This approach is conceptualized as a service within an Electronic Institution framework providing several agent-based services related with the formation and operation of virtual organizations.

Database and Expert Systems Applications. 8th International Conference, DEXA '97. Proceedings, 1997

1) Istituto di Studi sulla Ricerca e Documentazione Scientifica - CNR, Via Cesare de Lollis 12, 00185 Roma 2) Dip. Informatica e Sistemistica-Università di Roma "La Sapienza", Via Salaria 113, Roma ... Keywords: Workflow, Co-operative work, Conceptual model

This paper discusses an object oriented approach to business process modeling. The basic idea of this approach is to view business processes as being objects at their own, that incorporate the rules and conditions for a particular business of a given enterprise or organisation. A specific abstraction concept called cooperation is introduced allowing for a natural and comprehensive design of concurrent operations or interdependent interactions that are performed by different agents in the course of a specific business process. Two examples will demonstrate the approach.

Systems Analysis Modelling Simulation, 1999

Proceedings of the 2005 OOPSLA workshop on Eclipse technology eXchange - eclipse '05, 2005

While the specification languages of workflow management systems focus on process execution semantics, the successful development of workflows relies on a fuller conceptualisation of business processing, including process semantics. For this, a wellspring of modelling techniques, paradigms and informal-formal method extensions which address the analysis of organisational processing structures (enterprise modelling) and communication (based on speech-act theory), is available. However, the characterisations-indeed the cognition-of workflows still appears coarse. In this paper, we provide the complementary, empirical insight of a real-scale business transaction workflow. The development of the workflow model follows a set of principles which we believe address workflow modelling suitability. Through the principles, advanced considerations including asynchronous as well as synchronous messaging, temporal constraints and a service-oriented perspective are motivated. By illustrating the suitability principles and with it the inherent complexity of business transaction domains, we offer timely insights into workflow specification extension, and workflow reuse and deployment.

Information Systems Research, 2002