Interoperability Contributions of CrossWork

Abstract

Effective cross-organisational collaboration enables a company to focus on its core business within a dynamic network of partners providing complementary expertise. This allows companies of all sizes to pursue immediate opportunities in the marketplace through participation in virtual organizations and dynamic supply chains. Such collaboration-based business models, however, place substantial demands on software infrastructures to ensure robust intersystem communication, meaningful information exchange and successful coordination of processes and activities. Interoperability at all levels is paramount and significant advances in enabling software technologies are needed to support this. Interoperability issues are addressed by several EC-funded projects under the 6 Framework Programme. The focus here is on the specific contributions of one of them, CrossWork*, which pursues the automated creation of cross-organisational workflows to support opportunistic collaborations among members of Networks of Automotive Excellence. These collaborations, also known as task groups or virtual enterprises, are formed to pool together resources in the pursuit of business opportunities, for example responding to a call for tender, and are characterised by their decentralised decision-making and transient nature. Effective collaboration among task group members is a key success factor. This includes coordination of activities distributed amongst members, supported by crossorganisational workflows. Such workflows have to be formed in concert with the formation of the task group in a dynamic and opportunistic fashion. Achieving such level of process interoperability relies on frictionless information exchange between the information processing infrastructures of the group members, or interoperability at the systems level, within the context of compatible legal and organisational structures predicating interoperability at the business level. Any successful collaboration is informed and underpinned by a shared understanding and this reveals a fundamental need for semantic interoperability at the information level and beyond. Within this context, CrossWork focuses on the issues at process interoperability and semantic interoperability levels. We see interoperability as a systemic property of the set of collaborating entities, which arises in the context of their collaboration, rather than as an individual property of system components. We are therefore focused