Business Process Coordination: State of the Art, Trends, and Open Issues
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
Contracts for Cross-Organizational Workflow Management
EC-WEB '00 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies
Multi-Agent Cooperative Transactions for E-Commerce
CooplS '02 Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems
Conceptual Modeling for Collaborative E-business Processes
ER '01 Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling: Conceptual Modeling
Inter-Enterprise Collaborative Business Process Management
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Data Engineering
How Agents from Different E-Commerce Enterprises Cooperate
ISADS '01 Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems
Correlated Query Process and P2P Execution
Globe '08 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Data Management in Grid and Peer-to-Peer Systems
Data-Continuous SQL Process Model
OTM '08 Proceedings of the OTM 2008 Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, GADA, IS, and ODBASE 2008. Part I on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems:
Hi-index | 0.00 |
In this report we discuss the architecture of the Collaborative Process Managers (CPMs) used to support inter-enterprise collaboration. A CPM must provide three logical functions, the conversation management for handling interenterprise document flows; the process management for controlling local workflows of document manipulation and other related tasks; and the action management for invoking local services that actually implement these tasks. Conversation models and workflow models have some similarity as well as considerable differences. The provisioning, interaction and integration of these three functions are very practical challenges faced by many organizations. Particularly, extending existing workflow engines for supporting inter-enterprise business collaboration, has become the common interest of the e-business industry. We shall first compare five different CPM architectures based on our own prototypes, and then propose the architecture characterized by interfacing a conversation manager and a process manager through asynchronous task activation, and by using the conversation manager as the conversation model driven task activator for local process management. Our experience reveals the advantages of this architecture over the others, as it allows the maximal usability of existing workflow system components, supports both conversation flow and local work flow, and provides a dynamic and simple interface between conversation management and process management. Further, by providing conversation managers under different conversation models, a CPM can support multiple interenterprise interaction standards.