رویکرد مبتنی بر همکاری جریان کار درون سازمانی پویا

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.

In context of globalization, a high competitive pressure characterizes the general situation on businesses. Competition is a dilemma many organizations face every day. It can lead to intensive re-structuring of organizational structures and processes to make production and services more efficient and less expensive. Additionally, new forms of inter-organizational collaboration between organizations may emerge. In this case organizations especially Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs), cooperate to fulfill conditions of complex, often concurrent projects. Parallel to this evolution, organizations are increasingly utilizing process-aware information systems to perform their workflows in an automated way. Based on such information systems, organizations focus on their core competencies and access other competencies through cooperation, moving towards a new form of network known as virtual organization. There is still no agreed-upon definition of virtual organizations. Broadly speaking, a virtual organization is often defined as a temporary organization formed from strategic alliances or partnerships (“real organizations”) that can be dissolved when the common business or the common project is finished. For Davidow and Malone [1], the word “virtual” comes from the idea of “potential” meaning “excellent”, “high quality” or “advanced”. A virtual organization is considered as the modern organizational form, and hence, as being the more advanced and the most efficient one [2]. Byrne defines a virtual organization as a temporary network of independent companies, suppliers, customers, and even rivals, linked by information technology to share costs, skills and access to markets. It will have neither central offices nor organizational charts, nor hierarchies, and no vertical integration [3]. As for us, we define a virtual organization as a set of partners (“real organizations”) distributed in time and in space sharing resources and competencies (similar or dissimilar) and cooperating to reach some shared objectives using information technologies. Thus, partners with complementary competencies and knowledge can be gathered to carry out projects, which are not within the range of only one organization: cooperation allows each partner to benefit from knowledge of the other partners in the virtual organization. With this intention, partner workflows are not carried out in an isolated manner, but interact during their execution, while sharing data in a coordinated way [e.g., 28]. Coordination brings a synergy that contributes to the improvement of each partner work performances. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 identifies the requirements our contribution aims to meet. Section 3 presents the existing approaches for inter-organizational workflows. Section 4 proposes a three steps approach for inter-organizational workflow cooperation: workflow identification and advertisement, workflow interconnection, and workflow cooperation. All steps are discussed, and the second step is presented in more detail in Section 5. Section 6 provides a brief overview on the cooperation prototype platform we are developing. Section 7 concludes and presents our future work.

In this paper we presented important steps to provide support for inter-organizational workflows. The relevance of inter-organizational workflows is best seen when considering emerging virtual organizational forms, consisting of geographically dispersed teams and their respective business processes. 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. Furthermore, the 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. Currently we are in the process of finalizing building a prototype system where our ideas are implemented, validated, and tested. This paper presents an approach to inter-organizational workflows. Many open issues we are addressing and we have to deal with in our future work. For example, the question here is what are the necessary properties local workflows have to satisfy in order to be consistent with the cooperation? Examples of these properties are soundness and correctness criteria. What are the mechanisms utilized for semantic registries? More research is requited on those issues. Consistency of inter-organizational workflows, as introduced in [14], is defined as soundness of the global (i.e., inter-organizational) workflow and the local workflows. In addition, [35] and [36] has proposed an approach of a decentralized solution that relies the soundness of a constructed view based on the local workflow combined with the party’s view on the the global workflow, which is not specified explicitly. In particular, the local workflows are extended by bilateral interactions they are involved in. With our approach, we are now improving the minimalization technique of the internal workflow to preserve four kinds of behaviors on the cooperative activities: sequential behaviors, alternative behaviors, parallel behavior, and divergent behavior. To accomplish this task, we are basing our work on the exploitation of linear invariants in Petri nets.