Qualitative and quantitative specification of interorganisational workflows

Abstract

An interorganisational workflow is essentially a system of concurrent independent entities that interact via the possibly unreliable exchange of messages. In order to enact a software process in a distributed workflow environment, the members must communicate with each other in order to exchange data values and synchronisation messages. Due to the fact that the qualitative and the quantitative descriptions of interorganisational workflows are of different natures, we opted for a methodology that uses two description techniques: one for the functional behaviour (process algebra) and one for the quantitative information (real-time temporal logic).