DynaFlow: a dynamic inter-organisational workflow management system

Abstract

As the global marketplace becomes more and more competitive, business organisations often need to team up and operate as a virtual enterprise to utilise the best of their resources for achieving their common business goals. As the business environment of a virtual enterprise is highly dynamic, it is necessary to develop a workflow management technology that is capable of handling dynamic workflows across enterprise boundaries. This paper describes a Dynamic Workflow Model (DWM) and a dynamic workflow management system (DynaFlow) for modelling and controlling the execution of inter-organisational business processes. DWM enables the specification of dynamic properties associated with a business process model. It extends the underlying model of the WfMC's WPDL by adding connectors, events, triggers and rules as its modelling constructs. It also encapsulates activity definitions and allows web service (or e-service) requests to be included as a part of the activity specification. Using DWM as the underlying model, DynaFlow makes use of an Event-Trigger-Rule (ETR) server to trigger rules during the enactment of a workflow process to enforce business rules and policies and/or to modify the process model at run-time. A constraint-based, dynamic service binding mechanism is used to dynamically bind web service requests to web services that satisfy the requirements of the requests.