Cooperation Policies for Inter-organizational Workflows

Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2006

This paper presents a novel approach to inter-organizational workflow cooperation. Our goal is to provide support for organizations which are involved in a shared but not pre-modeled cooperative workflow across organizational boundaries. Our approach allows for partial visibility of workflows and their resources, thus providing powerful ways for inter-organizational workflow configuration. Varying degrees of visibility of workflows enable organizations to retain required levels of privacy and security of internal workflows. Our presented view concept provides a high degree of flexibility for participating organizations, since internal structures of collaborative workflows may be adapted without changes in the inter-organizational workflows. Furthermore, we provide workflow participants with the freedom to change their workflows without changing their roles in the cooperation. This increases flexibility and is an important step to increase efficiency as well as reduction in costs for inter-organizational workflows. The presented approach is inspired by the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Accordingly, our approach consists of three steps: workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection, and workflow cooperation.

NIJSES Publication, 2023

Traditional access control mechanisms focus on centralized systems and implicitly assume that all resources reside in one domain. This serves as a critical limitation for inter-organizational collaboration, which is characteristically decentralized, distributed and heterogeneous. A consequence of the lack of suitable access control mechanisms for inter-organizational collaborative environments is that data owners relinquish all control over data they release. This paper emphasizes using cryptography for access control, and enforcement for addressing the access control concerns for interorganizational environments. An essential requirement of workflows is the ability to transfer data resources from one entity to another. From a security perspective, current support for electronic data flow is inadequate for inter-organizational workflows, partly due to access control limitations for inter-organizational environments.

2018

Inter-organizational workflows have become increasingly used by companies to improve their productivity by sharing resources and activities. These systems have proven their effectiveness in several areas. However, the sensitivity of the exchanged data, push participating organizations to set authorization rules in order to protect their data and processes. At this level, the cohabitation of different security policies arises as a problematic issue. In fact, how can we combine different or even conflicting policies with regard to privacy preserving and collaboration objectives? In this paper, we propose a new Inter-Organizational Workflow Based Access Control (IOW-BAC) approach. Besides, we present a new algorithm to resolve potential detected conflicts occurring during the composition of the global Access Control policy. This algorithm is based on a set of important parameters which are organization’s weight, object owner, task criticality and object sensitivity.

Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2001

Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 1994

Characteristic to workflow management is modeling of workflow of manual coordination activities and automated production activities. Conceptual models are used to analyze and describe workflow, though most of these models are not very suitable for representing and relating both coordination activities and production activities. In the Input-Process-Output paradigm, workflow is modeled in terms of processes and data flow, whereas the Customer-Supplier paradigm defines conversation patterns between the actors. The rather intimate relationship between actor interactions and processual structures is recorded in neither of them. In this paper, we suggest to extend the IPO paradigm with concepts for coordination activities. We introduce actors and services as a separate model, and show how two-way flows, ports and rules help us model cooperative and manual aspects in data flow diagrams.

2000

Nowadays, many organizations form dynamic partnerships to deal effectively with market requirements. As companies use automated workflow management systems (WFMSs) to control their processes, a way of linking workflow processes in different organizations is required for turning the cooperating companies into a seamless operating virtual enterprise.

ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin, 1999

The increasing deployment of Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) and other co-ordination and process support systems on the one hand and the proliferation of cheap networking, namely the Internet, on the other hand raises the issue of how to connect these systems across organisational boundaries. Current WfMSs do not provide suitable means for cross-organisational connections. The workshop "Cross-Organizational Workflow Management and Co-ordination" at the International Joint Conference on Work Activities Coordination and Collaboration, San Francisco, February 22 -25, 1999 provided a forum to discuss workflow management and co-ordination in situations in which processes span multiple independent organisations. The workshop helped the ca. 30 participants understand the key problems and clarified ways in which existing products and prototypes as well as current projects contribute to enable cross-organisational workflow execution.

1997

Abstract The research reported in this dissertation deals with work ow management and electronic publishing. Recent developments like the evolvement of international standards, advanced communication services, as well as new delivery platforms, have resulted in a bewildering number of work ow systems, each of them being a proprietary solution. The consequences are noninteroperable systems where work ow information cannot be exchanged, a fact which does back re with the ideas of recent developments.

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.

2008

Abstract Inter-organisational workflow (IOW) is a natural scenario for MAS (multiagent system) technologies. In particular, MAS coordination infrastructures can work as a general-purpose support for WfMSs (workflow management systems): coordination artifacts can be specialised as workflow engines, encapsulating workflow rules expressed in terms of coordination laws.