Verification of Inter-Organizational Workflow Models in Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Inter-organizational workflows play an important role in supply chain management. The deployment of correctly designed workflow models helps avoid higher costs of breakdown, debugging, and fixing during runtime. The issue of workflow verification is even more critical in supply chain management as its workflow is comprised of a global workflow and the private workflows of all organizations involved. Furthermore, the autonomous requirement makes it difficult to verify all parts of the supply chain workflow as a single step. That is, organizations in a supply chain usually have no information about the processes of other organizations, and each organization can change its processes so long as such changes do not violate the public processes. As a result, an inter-organizational workflow cannot be simply treated as a single workflow for the purpose of verification. In this paper, we extend our logic-based workflow verification approach to supply chain management. We propose a two-level technique in which we isolate private processes by splitting public activities, verify each private process, and then verify the global process. We demonstrate the validity of the two-level approach in the context of supply chain management.