Cross-organizational Workflow Research Articles

Cost analysis for a resource sensitive workflow modelling language

Workflow analysis usually requires domain-specific knowledge from the domain experts, making it a relatively manual process. In addition, workflows often cross organisational boundaries. As a result, minor local modifications in the workflow of a collaborative partner may be propagated to other concurrently running tasks of the workflow, which is difficult for the domain experts to recognise since they only have a limited (local) view of the workflow. Therefore, changes in cross-organisational workflows may result in significant adverse impacts. This paper presents a resource-sensitive formal modelling language, , which has explicit notions of task dependencies, qualitative assessment of resources, time advancement and method execution deadlines. The language allows the workflow analysers to estimate the effect of changes in collaborative workflows with respect to cost in terms of execution time. This paper proposes a static analysis to compute the worst execution time of a cross-organisational workflow modelled in by defining a compositional function that translates an program to a set of cost equations. • In most cases, workflow analysis requires domain-specific knowledge, which makes it a relatively manual process. Additionally, workflows often cross organizational boundaries. Thus, slight local modifications in the workflow of a collaborative partner may be propagated to other concurrently running tasks of the workflow, which is difficult for domain experts to discern since they have only a limited (local) view of the workflow. Therefore, changes in cross-organizational workflows could have adverse effects. This paper presents a resource-sensitive formal modelling language, Rpl. The language has explicit notions for task dependencies, resource allocation and time advancement. The language allows the workflow analyzers to estimate the effect of changes in collaborative workflows with respect to cost in terms of execution time. This paper proposes a static analysis for computing the worst execution time of a cross-organizational workflow modelled in Rpl by defining a compositional function that translates an Rpl program to a set of cost equations.

Privacy-Preserving Behavioral Correctness Verification of Cross-Organizational Workflow With Task Synchronization Patterns

Workflow management technology has become a key means to improve enterprise productivity. More and more workflow systems are crossing organizational boundaries and may involve multiple interacting organizations. This article focuses on a type of loosely coupled workflow architecture with collaborative tasks, i.e., each business partner owns its private business process and is able to operate independently, and all involved organizations need to be synchronized at a certain point to complete certain public tasks. Because of each organization’s privacy consideration, they are unwilling to share the business details with others. In this way, traditional correctness verification approaches via reachability analysis are not practical as a global business process model is unavailable for privacy preservation. To ensure its globally correct execution, this work establishes a correctness verification approach for the cross-organizational workflow with task synchronization patterns. Its core idea is to use local correctness of each suborganizational workflow process to guarantee its global correctness. We prove that the proposed approach can be used to investigate the behavioral property preservation when synthesizing suborganizational workflows via collaborative tasks. A medical diagnosis running case is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approaches. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —Cross-organizational workflow verification techniques play an increasingly important role in ensuring the correct execution of collaborative enterprise businesses. This work addresses the issue of correctness verification for loosely coupled interactive workflows with collaborative tasks. To ensure the globally correct execution, a behavioral correctness verification approach is established. All proposed concepts and techniques are supported by open-source tools, and evaluation over a medical diagnosis process case has shown their applicability. The proposed methodology is readily applicable to industrial-size workflow correctness verification problems.

Cross-Organizational Workflow Task Allocation Algorithms for Socially Aware Collaborative Computing

Cross-Organizational Workflow Task Allocation Algorithms for Socially Aware Collaborative Computing

Sharing Structure and Function in Biological Design with SBOL 2.0.

The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) is a standard that enables collaborative engineering of biological systems across different institutions and tools. SBOL is developed through careful consideration of recent synthetic biology trends, real use cases, and consensus among leading researchers in the field and members of commercial biotechnology enterprises. We demonstrate and discuss how a set of SBOL-enabled software tools can form an integrated, cross-organizational workflow to recapitulate the design of one of the largest published genetic circuits to date, a 4-input AND sensor. This design encompasses the structural components of the system, such as its DNA, RNA, small molecules, and proteins, as well as the interactions between these components that determine the system's behavior/function. The demonstrated workflow and resulting circuit design illustrate the utility of SBOL 2.0 in automating the exchange of structural and functional specifications for genetic parts, devices, and the biological systems in which they operate.

Model checking multi-level and recursive nets

With the increasing complexity of the problems and systems arising nowadays, the use of multi-level models is becoming more frequent in practice. However, there are still few reports in the literature concerning methods for analyzing such models without flattening the multi-level structure. For instance, several variants of multi-level Petri nets have been applied for modeling interaction protocols and mobility in multi-agent systems and coordination of cross-organizational workflows. But there are few automated tools for analyzing the behavior of these nets. In this paper we explain how to detect faults in models based on a representative class of multi-level nets: the nested Petri nets. We translate a nested net into a verifiable model that preserves its modular structure, a PROMELA program. This allows the use of SPIN model checker to verify properties related to termination, boundedness and reachability.

Embedded Differential Access Control for Printing Variable Jobs

Business case requirements have resulted in related documents that are native to their individual formats being combined into a collection called composite documents. These are used for a variety of activities such as presentations, premium/sensitive content distributions and business workflows, and may include standard types such as PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint Slides and other specially formatted files. Additionally, cross-organizational workflow demands have created new challenges for the management of such composite documents. These include access control to individual parts, security and privacy issues in the absence of shared trusted infrastructure, communication over popular and potentially insecure channels, auditing, print control and disposal. These challenges led to the development of Publicly Posted Composite Documents (PPCDs) [1] as a recently proposed document format that enables the secure containment and transfer of personalized document versions over insecure channels, with the access control and policies built into and carried within the document itself (as an integral part). PPCD technology is intended to act as the central pillar of document workflow scenarios, where a single document can be created, controlled, accessed, used and monitored throughout its life cycle as it participates in inter-organizational workflows. However, PPCD technology is currently missing an important property of electronic documents: the ability to be securely printed to a physical copy. The limited resources on multi-function printer (MFP) devices and the security focused structure of PPCDs makes this a challenging and non-trivial problem. Thus, in this paper we utilize the unique structure of PPCDs to describe novel mechanisms and firmware extensions on MFPs for enforcing differential access control and printing.

Integrate engine manufacturer’s knowledge into the preliminary aircraft sizing process

Purpose – This paper aims to set up and assess a new method to collaboratively mature the requirements for engine development in a more efficient way during the preliminary design phase. Design/methodology/approach – A collaborative process has been set up in which detailed information on the behaviour of designed engines has been integrated into the aircraft preliminary sizing process by means of surrogate modelling. Findings – The engine surrogate model has been invoked as a black box from within the aircraft preliminary design optimisation loops. The surrogate model reduces the uncertainty of coarse-grain formulas and may result in more competitive aircraft and engine designs. The surrogate model has been integrated in a collaborative cross-organisational workflow between aircraft manufacturer, engine manufacturer and simulation service providers to prepare for its deployment in industrial preliminary design processes. Practical implications – The new collaborative way of working between aircraft manuf...

Designing an Architectural Style for Dynamic Medical Cross-Organizational Workflow Management System: An Approach Based on Agents and Web Services

This paper shows how the combined use of agent and web services technologies can help to design an architectural style for dynamic medical Cross-Organizational Workflow (COW) management system. Medical COW aims at supporting the collaboration between several autonomous and possibly heterogeneous medical processes, distributed over different organizations (Hospitals, Clinic or laboratories). Dynamic medical COW refers to occasional cooperation between these health organizations, free of structural constraints, where the medical partners involved and their number are not pre-defined. More precisely, this paper proposes a new architecture style based on agents and web services technologies to deal with two key coordination issues of dynamic COW: medical partners finding and negotiation between them. It also proposes how the proposed architecture for dynamic medical COW management system can connect to a multi-agent system coupling the Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) with Computerized Prescriber Order Entry (CPOE). The idea is to assist the health professionals such as doctors, nurses and pharmacists with decision making tasks, as determining diagnosis or patient data analysis without stopping their clinical processes in order to act in a coherent way and to give care to the patient.

Cross-organizational workflow in radiology: an empirical study of the quality of shared metadata elements in Region Västra Götaland, Sweden

Challenges related to the cross-organizational access of accurate and timely information about a patient's condition has become a critical issue in healthcare. Interoperability of different local sources is necessary. To identify and present missing and semantically incorrect data elements of metadata in the radiology enterprise service that supports cross-organizational sharing of dynamic information about patients' visits, in the Region Västra Götaland, Sweden. Quantitative data elements of metadata were collected yearly from the first Wednesday in March from 2006 to 2011 from the 24 in-house radiology departments in Region Västra Götaland. These radiology departments were organized into four hospital groups and three stand-alone hospitals. Included data elements of metadata were the patient name, patient ID, institutional department name, referring physician's name, and examination description. The majority of missing data elements of metadata was related to the institutional department name for Hospital 2, from 87% in 2007 to 25% in 2011. All data elements of metadata except the patient ID contained semantic errors. For example, for the data element "patient name", only three names out of 3537 were semantically correct. This study shows that the semantics of metadata elements are poorly structured and inconsistently used. Although a cross-organizational solution may technically be fully functional, semantic errors may prevent it from serving as an information infrastructure for collaboration between all departments and hospitals in the region. For interoperability, it is important that the agreed semantic models are implemented in vendor systems using the information infrastructure.

Contracts for cross-organizational workflows as timed Dynamic Condition Response Graphs

We conservatively extend the declarative Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) Graph process model, introduced in the PhD thesis of the second author, to allow for discrete time deadlines. We prove that safety and liveness properties can be verified by mapping finite timed DCR Graphs to finite state transition systems. We exemplify how deadlines can introduce time-locks and deadlocks and violate liveness. We then prove that the general technique for safe distribution of DCR Graphs provided in previous work can be extended to timed DCR Graphs. We exemplify the use of timed DCR Graphs and the distribution technique in praxis on a timed extension of a cross-organizational case management process arising from a previous case study. The example shows how a timed DCR Graph can be used to describe the global contract for a timed workflow process involving several organizations, which can then be distributed as a network of communicating timed DCR Graphs describing the local contract for each organization.

Cross-organizational collaborative workflow mining from a multi-source log

Today's enterprise business processes become increasingly complex given that they are often executed by geographically dispersed partners or different organizations. Designing and modeling such a cross-organizational workflow is a complicated, time-consuming process and requires that a designer has extensive experience. Workflow logs captured by different cross-organizational systems provide a very valuable source of information on how business processes are executed in reality and thus can be used to derive workflow models through process mining. In this paper, we investigate the application of process mining for workflow integration based on the concept of RM_WF_Net, a type of Petri net extended with resource and message factors. Four coordination patterns are defined for workflow integration. A process mining approach is presented to discover the coordination patterns between different organizations and the workflow models in different organizations from the running logs containing the information about resource allocation. A process integration approach is then presented to obtain the model for a cross-organizational workflow based on the model mined for each organization and the coordination patterns between different organizations.

Interaction protocols for cross-organisational workflows

Workflow technologies are widely used in industry and commerce to assist in the specification, execution and completion of well defined processes within organisations. As industrial and commercial relations have evolved, based on advances on information and communications technologies, cross-organisational workflow integration has become an important issue. Since organisations can have very different workflows, the creation of compatible workflows so that organisations can collaborate and/or carry out mutual transactions automatically in an integrated fashion can be a very complex and time consuming process. As a consequence, the development of technologies to support the creation and execution of compatible workflows is a most relevant issue. In the present article we introduce the JamSession coordination platform as a tool to implement cross-organisational workflow integration. JamSession is declarative and based on algebraic specification methods, and therefore workflow integration implemented using this platform can profit from formal behavioural analysis, based on which desired features and properties can be verified and/or obtained.

Modelling and analysis of workflow for lean supply chains

Cross-organisational workflow systems are a component of enterprise information systems which support collaborative business process among organisations in supply chain. Currently, the majority of workflow systems is developed in perspectives of information modelling without considering actual requirements of supply chain management. In this article, we focus on the modelling and analysis of the cross-organisational workflow systems in the context of lean supply chain (LSC) using Petri nets. First, the article describes the assumed conditions of cross-organisation workflow net according to the idea of LSC and then discusses the standardisation of collaborating business process between organisations in the context of LSC. Second, the concept of labelled time Petri nets (LTPNs) is defined through combining labelled Petri nets with time Petri nets, and the concept of labelled time workflow nets (LTWNs) is also defined based on LTPNs. Cross-organisational labelled time workflow nets (CLTWNs) is then defined based on LTWNs. Third, the article proposes the notion of OR-silent CLTWNS and a verifying approach to the soundness of LTWNs and CLTWNs. Finally, this article illustrates how to use the proposed method by a simple example. The purpose of this research is to establish a formal method of modelling and analysis of workflow systems for LSC. This study initiates a new perspective of research on cross-organisational workflow management and promotes operation management of LSC in real world settings.

Research on Reliability Modeling of Cross-Organizational Workflows Based on Hierarchical Colored Petri Nets

To reduce the complexity of cross-organizational workflow modeling and verification, a reliable modeling method of cross-organizational workflows based on hierarchical colored Petri nets is proposed. At the foundation of discussing formal definitions of global and local workflows, the paper develops reliability modeling constraints of cross-organizational workflows from structure to logic. Under these constraints, a top-down cross-organizational workflow model is built. Those substitution transitions which input places were safe in global workflow are refined by reliable local workflows to guarantee the reliability of cross-organizational workflow model.

Protocol contracts with application to choreographed multiparty collaborations

E-commerce collaborations and cross-organizational workflow applications are increasingly attractive given the universal connectivity provided by the Internet. Such applications are inherently concurrent and non-deterministic, so standard software engineering practices are inadequate, and we need new techniques to design extended collaborations and ensure that the implemented designs will behave correctly. The emerging technique for achieving this is to use a choreography, a global description of the possible sequencing of message exchange between the participants, as the basis for both the design of the collaboration and verification of its behavior. We describe a new technique that uses compositions of partial descriptions to define a choreography and show how the technique can be used to model the use of data and computation in the rules of the collaboration. We define conditions for correctness and show that they can be applied separately to each partial description. We demonstrate the expressive power of the technique with examples and discuss how it improves on previously published approaches.

A process-view approach for cross-organizational workflows management

Workflow management for cross-organizational business processes presents a significant challenge recently. The development and implementation of new methodologies and technologies are imperative to tackle this challenge. The process-view approach provides a promising way to facilitate cross-organizational workflows management, especially when it is combined with powerful workflow modeling methods. With the assumption that workflow modeling methods in cooperative organizations are interoperable, a process-view and timed colored Petri net (TCPN) combined approach is proposed to manage cross-organizational workflows, including the formal definition, the mapping from TCPN workflow models to process-view workflow models in which the aspects of control flow and data flow are considered together, and the collaborative execution mechanisms of cross-organizational workflow instances. A hybrid P2P based decentralized workflow management system (WMS) combined with the process-view approach is proposed and built, which is placed on the top of the open JXTA platform and provides a flexible and scalable architecture for cross-organizational workflows management. At last, the cross-organizational workflows management for the distributed development of a circular saw has been used as a test case for system validation.

Interoperability of Cross-organizational Workflows based on Process-view for Collaborative Product Development

Collaborative product development (CPD) has been widely accepted as an advanced collaboration paradigm that combines geographically distributed product development teams to develop product collaboratively and efficiently. Interoperability of cross-organizational workflows is important for CPD to facilitate the successful execution of the whole product development process across enterprises boundaries. This article, describes a timed colored petri net (TCPN) and process-view combined approach to construct cross-organizational workflows, and a three models framework of `TCPN workflow models — Process-view workflow models — Integrated process-view workflow model' is proposed to realize the interoperability of cross-organizational workflows for CPD. A multi-agent system PVMAS provides a mediated architecture for distributed workflow management systems interoperability among cooperative enterprises. Under this architecture, a service discovery algorithm is provided for discovering the most suitable services enterprises need, a TCPN algebra model and a character string mapping algorithm are proposed to automate the mapping from a TCPN workflow model to a process-view workflow model, and the synchronization points are designated in the integrated process-view workflow model to coordinate the execution of cross-organizational workflow instances. Finally, a case study of the collaborative development of a motorcycle is presented to verify the validity of our approach for cross-organizational workflows interoperability in CPD.

A XML-Based Distributed Workflow Modeling Tools

Most of workflow management systems in the market are based on centralized defining in the organization. Further more, they have poor ability to describe the complex process, and have difficulty to deal with the business process share between cross-organizations. To support virtual and cross-organizational workflows in distributed environment, WfMSs must realize cross-organizational and distributed management to improve the dependability and extensible etc. To solve these issues, a Web-based lightweight process modeling system has been developed in this paper. This system is based on Java and XML technology, and provides friendly GUI which is easy to be used. The model document can be saved in XML format, so the interoperation between different workflow products becomes easy. This system establishes the base for enacting the WfMSs.

Research on Cross-Organizational Workflow Modeling Based on Pi-Calculus

Research on Cross-Organizational Workflow Modeling Based on Pi-Calculus

Developing web services choreography standards—the case of REST vs. SOAP

This paper presents a case study of the development of standards in the area of cross-organizational workflows based on web services. We discuss two opposing types of standards: those based on SOAP, with tightly coupled designs similar to remote procedure calls, and those based on REST, with loosely coupled designs similar to the navigating of web links. We illustrate the standardization process, clarify the technical underpinnings of the conflict, and analyze the interests of stakeholders. The decision criteria for each group of stakeholders are discussed. Finally, we present implications for both the workflow and the wider Internet communities.