On the concurrency of inter-organizational business processes
OTM'06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: AWeSOMe, CAMS, COMINF, IS, KSinBIT, MIOS-CIAO, MONET - Volume Part I
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Heterogeneous workflow management systems often have to cooperate in order to execute inter-organizational or inter-departmental processes, i.e., processes that involve more than one enterprise/department. The problem of workflow interoperability is aggravated by the fact that the autonomy of participating workflow management systems has to be preserved. In this paper, we present an approach towards workflow interoperability that allows to specify and execute workflows over a federation of heterogeneous workflow management systems. This approach is based on a global repository to which members can export workflow types they define or from which they can import external types as subworkflows. On the software architecture level, we show how workflow system federations can be modeled in such a way that the glue needed for interoperability is reusable and leveraged to a more abstract level than the usually applied technique of point-to-point cooperation based on APIs.