Inheritance of Interorganizational Workflows: How to Agree to Disagree Without Loosing Control?

  • Authors:

  • W. M. P. Van Der Aalst

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, NL-5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder ...

  • Venue:
  • Information Technology and Management
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Internet-based technology, E-commerce, and the rise of networked virtual enterprises have fueled the need for interorganizational workflows. Although XML allows trading partners to exchange information, it cannot be used to coordinate activities in different organizational entities. Business-to-business processes are hindered by the lack of a common language to support collaboration. This paper describes the P2P (Public-To-Private) approach which addresses one of the most notorious problems in this domain: How to design an interorganizational workflow such that there is local autonomy without compromising the consistency of the overall process. The approach uses a notion of inheritance and consists of three steps: (1) create a common understanding of the interorganizational workflow by specifying the shared public workflow, (2) partition the public workflow over the organizational entities involved, and (3) for each organizational entity: create a private workflow which is a subclass of the relevant part of the public workflow. This paper shows that this approach avoids typical anomalies in business-to-business collaboration (e.g., deadlocks and livelocks) and yields an interorganizational workflow which is guaranteed to realize the behavior specified in the public workflow.