DISCOBOLE: معماری سرویس برای متصل شدن فرآیندهای جریان کار

Process interconnection mechanisms are necessary to coordinate geographically distributed business processes in order to strength awareness inside virtual enterprises, to facilitate multinational e-transactions, etc. Actually, existing business process modelling and enactment systems (workflow systems, project management tools, shared agendas, to do lists, etc.) have been mainly developed to suit enterprise internal needs. Thus, most of these systems are not adapted to inter-enterprise cooperation. As we are interested in workflow processes, we aim, through this paper, to present a model supporting dynamic heterogeneous workflow process interconnection. We consider the interconnection of enterprise workflow processes as the management of a “workflow of workflows” in which several heterogeneous workflow systems coexist. This paper introduces our process interconnection model, its implementation, and its validation through experimentation.

Our aim is to provide an architecture to support dynamic interconnection of enterprise workflow processes. By interconnection of enterprise workflow processes, we mean the management of a “workflow of workflows” in which several heterogeneous workflow management systems coexist. By dynamics of enterprise workflow process interconnection, we mean that process interconnection does consider neither predetermined communication primitives, nor scheduled points of rendezvous. In other terms, an enterprise, aiming to interconnect its workflow process with another organisation workflow process has to discover and co-decide an interconnection contract at run-time. To be interconnected with other processes, a workflow process out-sources dynamically parts of it to the other workflow processes. This enables interactions resulting from workflow interconnection to be limited in the time (i.e. to the out-sourcing period) and then to be well managed and controlled. Our process service interconnection model contribution consists of enriching SOA (service oriented approach) with new paradigms and applying this enhanced approach to resolve heterogeneous workflow process interconnection problem. We propose a generic model for workflow process interconnection problem and validate this model on heterogeneous workflow management systems. Our paper is structured as follows. After a short introduction, Section 2 presents the process interconnection problematic, and the state of the art, Section 3 formalises our process service interconnection model, Section 4 presents an implementation of our model, and gives some hints on our system experimentation. Finally, a short conclusion ends this paper.

Our paper is a contribution in enterprise workflow interconnection domain which is a hot research topic as far as the current B2B (Business to Business) boom is concerned. In spite of normalisation efforts, WFMS are still presenting monolithic and heterogeneous drawbacks. Thanks to processes and process services frameworks, our model bypasses these drawbacks by enabling enterprise workflow processes interconnection within a “workflow of workflows” in which several workflow management systems coexist. Our model has been developed to support a wide panel of workflow management systems and experimented to prove the feasibility of dynamic enterprise workflow processes. After dealing with process interconnection problems, we are tackling problems of composed process service protocols [28], enactment and execution control [29].