Steering dynamic collaborations between business processes

  • Authors:

  • Xiaohui Zhao;Chengfei Liu

  • Affiliations:

  • Information Systems Group, Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Centre for Complex Software Systems and Services, Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Vic, Australia

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Under the background of business globalization nowadays, many organizations are connecting their business processes into complex collaborative business processes to facilitate business collaboration. To adapt to the changing requirements and market opportunities, collaborative business processes have to evolve all the time. Such dynamics brings challenges to the modeling and tracking of collaborative business processes. In addition, these issues can be further complicated by the requirements of privacy protection and information openness in the interorganizational context. Aiming to tackle these problems, this paper proposes a comprehensive framework to model and track dynamic collaborative business processes with our extended relative workflow model. This framework helps each participating organization derive its collaborative business processes and update the processes at run time. A process visibility control mechanism is developed to enforce such derivation and extend organizations' process perception via process visibility transitivity. The whole framework is formalized with matrices and is theoretically proven to be privacy safe. Corresponding algorithms are developed for generating and tracking collaborative business processes. A prototype is also implemented for the proof-of-concept purpose.