Cross-Organizational Transaction Support for E-Services in Virtual Enterprises

In recent years, workflow management systems have become an accepted technology to support automation in process-centric environments. Lately, organizations concentrate more and more on their core business processes while outsourcing supporting processes to other organizations, thereby forming virtual enterprises. The organizations forming the virtual enterprise operate in a B2B e-commerce setting in which provider organizations perform e-services for consumer organizations. To apply workflow management technology in these virtual enterprises, current workflow management systems need to be extended to offer support for cross-organizational processes. Transaction support, already considered an important issue in intra-organizational workflow management systems, must be extended to deal with the cross-organizational aspects as well. This paper presents a high-level, compensation based transaction model and a flexible architecture to support thistransaction model, as required by cross-organizational workflow processes. Characteristic of the model is the flexibility in rollback semantics by combining rollback modes and rollback scopes. This is supported by a dynamically composed architecture that is configured using the agreements that are specified in an electronic contract that has been established between the participating organizations. The transaction model supported by the dynamically composed architecture is implemented in a prototype system, based on commercial workflow management technology.     

基于时间Petri网的工作流模型分析

工作流管理的最终目的是实现适当的人在适当的时间执行适当的活动.企业要获得竞争力,需要在工作流模型中考虑与业务过程相关的时间约束.一个考虑时间因素的工作流模型,需要在投入运行前进行时间规范与验证,以保证工作流执行的时间协调.通过为工作流网元素扩展时间属性,得到集成业务过程时间约束的工作流模型??时间约束工作流网(TCWF-nets).基于对业务活动的可调度性分析,提出了时序一致性验证方法,确保工作流执行中活动之间时间交互的安全性.在所附加的时间约束下,该可调度分析方法不仅能够检测某一给定工作流调度的时间可行性,还能对特定的实例给出一个最优调度,使工作流执行延迟最小.研究结果表明,该方法支持业务过程的时间建模与分析,对于丰富现有工作流系统的时间管理功能以及增强现存工作流软件对动态业务环境的适应性具有重要意义.     

An overview of workflow management: From process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure

Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area. Recomended by: Omran Bukhres and e. Kühn     

Context-aware workflow management for virtual enterprises based on coordination of agents

Although virtual enterprises (VE) make it possible for small flexible enterprises to form a collaborative network to respond to business opportunities through dynamic coalition and sharing of the core competencies and resources, they also pose new challenges and issues. Creation of VE involves dynamically established partnerships between the partners and relies on a flexible coordination scheme. The dynamic organizations formed in VE present a challenge in the development of a new methodology to dynamically allocate re-sources and deliver the relevant information to the right people at the right time. A key issue is the development of an effective workflow management scheme for VE. Multi-agent systems (MAS) provide a flexible architecture to deal with changes based on dynamic organization and collaboration of autonomous agents. Despite the extensive studies and research results on MAS, development of a design methodology to support coordination and operations is critical to the success and adoption of VE. The objectives of this research are to propose a design methodology to facilitate coordination and development of context-aware workflow management systems and achieve effective resource allocation for VE based on MAS architecture. To achieve these objectives, a scheme for coordination of agents is proposed. Petri net models are used in the coordination scheme to describe workflows and capture resource activities in VE. The interactions between agents lead to a dynamic workflow model for VE. Based on the aforementioned model, we propose architecture to dynamically generate context-aware graphical user interface to guide the users and control resource allocation based on the state of VE. An order management example is used throughout this paper to illustrate the proposed design methodology.     

Workflow modeling for virtual processes: an order-preserving process-view approach

Conducting workflow management allows virtual enterprises to collaboratively manage business processes. Given the diverse requirements of the participants involved in a business process, providing various participants with adequate process information is critical to effective workflow management. This work describes a novel process-view, i.e., an abstracted process which is derived from a base process to provide process abstraction, for modeling a virtual workflow process. The proposed process-view model enhances the conventional activity-based process models by providing different participants with various views of a process. Moreover, this work presents a novel order-preserving approach to derive a process-view from a base process. The approach proposed herein can preserve the original ordering of activities in the base process. Additionally, a formal model is presented to define an order-preserving process-view. Finally, an algorithm is proposed for automatically generating an order-preserving process-view. The proposed approach increases the flexibility and functionality of workflow management systems.     

基于工作流的虚拟企业信息管理模型

现代企业生产环境随着生产的全球化已经跨越 了国界,进行全球范围内的资源优化配置是有效利用全球资源的理想方案, 虚拟企业正是在 此需求下产生的．由于虚拟企业的分布式特点,其信息管理不同于传统的本地的管理方式． 本文给出一个基于工作流的虚拟企业信息管理模型,此模型支持的异构环境是地理上分散的 ,涉及到不同的应用包,多平台、多协议和多种用户界面,为虚拟企业生产信息管理提出了 一种方案．     

The Metamorphoses of Workflow Projects in their Early Stages

Empirical studies on workflow usually focus on systems which have already been introduced and on the problems which occur with these systems if exceptional cases differ from the regular business processes. This study focuses on the problems that occur in the early stages of projects intended to introduce workflow systems but which do not inevitably succeed. In most cases the companies under investigation eventually introduced other types of software, or the business processes were merely analysed and improved but not automated during the project. We explain this phenomenon by referring to Orlikowski’s concept of metamorphoses which analysed organizational change under conditions of groupware usage. A number of empirical details in our study of seven companies during a 4-year period can be related to this concept as well as to literature on workflow. In our ex-post study of the workflow projects we concluded that paradoxically starting with a workflow project might be an appropriate way of introducing improvement in cooperation and coordination without using workflow management technology and that concepts for flexible workflow technology are of minor relevance for this improvement.     

基于Web的工作流系统的安全性研究

近年来随着工作流技术的日趋成熟,越来越多的企业采用它作为提高企业效率的手段,但由于目前使用的IPv4并没有对数据提供任何安全性保障,因此如何保护其商业机密,即工作流系统的安全性问题也逐渐受到人们的关注。文章介绍了一个基于Web的工作流系统SecureWorkflow的安全体系结构及其安全策略,它充分考虑了在电子政务中的实际需求,并已应用于实际的应用系统集成平台的开发。     

The design of a JADE-based autonomous workflow management system for collaborative SoC design

Given a fast changing electronics goods marketplace, designers of integrated circuits and components need to be more competitive, efficient, flexible, and use collaborative workflow to reduce time-to-market and a project’s life cycle. In recent years, agent-based workflow management systems (WfMS) have been widely used to monitor and control business design processes. In this paper, intelligent agents are applied to the collaborative system-on-chip (SoC) design environment. The proposed JADE-based autonomous workflow management system (JAWMS) uses a workflow coordination mechanism and an agent integration mechanism to enable the analysis, management and interaction of automated design processes. The workflow coordination mechanism uses five domain specific agents to perform the workflow enactment services and a generic agent to control the system flow logic. The system kernel of JAWMS follows the specifications of the workflow reference model provided by the workflow management coalition (WfMC). The agent integration mechanism supports an agent to interact with other JADE-based agent platforms and to coordinate and monitor workflow coordination messages. All agents are written in the Java language using the JADE platform and work together to perform flexible, adaptive and dynamic design tasks in an autonomous and collaborative way. JAWMS facilitates SoC design and team interaction in a collaborative but distributed product development environment.     

The OCoN Approach to Workflow Modeling in Object-Oriented Systems

Workflow management aims at modeling and executing application processes in complex technical and organizational environments. Modern information systems are often based on object-oriented design techniques, for instance, the Unified Modeling Language (UML). These systems consist of application objects which collaborate to achieve a common goal. Although application objects collaborate in the context of business processes that can be supported by workflow technology, workflow modeling is typically done with proprietary workflow languages. Hence, two separate formalisms are present for modeling application objects and workflows. In this paper we try to remedy this situation by proposing the use of Object Coordination Nets (OCoN) for workflow modeling. OCoN nets provide a seamless integration with UML structure diagrams. The OCoN formalism also helps to deal with all relevant aspects of modeling complex workflow systems in a scalable and consistent manner.     

BPS工作流平台在协同办公系统中的应用

针对企业内部管理协作高效需求的日益凸显,介绍了普元工作流平台的参考模型。基于普元BPS工作流平台,构建了企业协同办公系统功能框架,并以企业核心业务发文处理流程为例,探讨了基于BPS工作流系统的流程设计过程,对构建信息共享和业务协同的高效企业具有重要意义。     

Modeling and Managing Interactions among Business Processes

Most workflow management systems (WfMSs) only support the separate andindependent execution of business processes. However, processes often needto interact with each other, in order to synchronize the execution of theiractivities, to exchange process data, to request execution of services, orto notify progresses in process execution. Recent market trends also raisethe need for cooperation and interaction between processes executed in differentorganizations, posing additional challenges. In fact, in order to reduce costsand provide better services, companies are pushed to increase cooperation and toform virtual enterprises, where business processes span across organizationalboundaries and are composed of cooperating workflows executed in differentorganizations. Workflow interaction in a cross-organizational environment iscomplicated by the heterogeneity of workflow management platforms on top ofwhich workflows are defined and executed and by the different and possiblycompeting business policies and business goals that drive process executionin each organization.In this paper we propose a model and system that enable interactionbetween workflows executed in the same or in different organizations. Weextend traditional workflow models by allowing workflows to publish andsubscribe to events, and by enabling the definition of points in the processexecution where events should be sent or received. Event notifications aremanaged by a suitable event service that is capable of filtering andcorrelating events, and of dispatching them to the appropriate targetworkflow instances. The extended model can be easily mapped onto anyworkflow model, since event specific constructs can be specified by means ofordinary workflow activities, for which we provide the implementation. Inaddition, the event service is easily portable to different platforms, anddoes not require integration with the WfMS that supports the cooperatingworkflows. Therefore, the proposed approach is applicable in virtually anyenvironment and is independent on the specific platform adopted     

A TCPN based approach to model the coordination in virtual manufacturing organizations☆

The recent developments of communication technologies and network computing have enabled the occurrence of the advanced manufacturing strategy—agile manufacturing. The essence of the agile manufacturing strategy is to form a virtual manufacturing organization (VMO), which integrates the core competencies of member enterprises in order to respond to the global market and increasing customer requirements rapidly. In a VMO, the manufacturing processes are distributed. So modeling and coordination of these processes are very complex. In this paper, we present a Petri Net based approach to model these distributed manufacturing processes and interaction relations among them. A workflow based manufacturing process execution environment is also established to support the implementation of the distributed manufacturing processes.     

Adding intelligent agents to existing EI frameworks

The global marketplace and the Internet have served as catalysts for enterprise integration (EI), both within a company and between a company and its suppliers and partners. EI software architectures, or frameworks, are often built on top of standard middleware and typically lack the ability to function in dynamic environments where flexibility, adaptability, and knowledge management are crucial. Furthermore, they do not scale well to wide-area enterprises that extend across organizational boundaries. These frameworks nevertheless offer a cost-effective basis for resource management, user coordination, knowledge exchange, and information extraction in a virtual enterprise. The paper considers how, by incorporating agents with their inherently distributed characteristics of autonomy, reasoning or intelligence, and goal-driven behavior, existing EI frameworks can be enhanced to support adaptive virtual enterprises     

Constructing continuities in virtual work environments: A multiple case study of two firms with differing degrees of virtuality

In this paper, we study how continuities are constructed in virtual work environments by comparing two firms with differing degrees of virtuality. Using Organizational Discontinuity Theory and drawing on a qualitative study of two accounting firms operating in Finland, we observe virtual work discontinuities in the two firms and identify constructed continuities. We find that in constructing continuities, virtual organizations need to balance rigid and flexible approaches regarding governance structure, the role of technology, communication management, and workflow management. Our main contributions are an empirical application of Organizational Discontinuity Theory to the comparison of virtual work environments and a set of propositions regarding how firms approach continuity construction in different virtuality contexts.     

Autonomy versus efficiency in multi-agent management of extended enterprises

Present evolution of manufacturing systems is characterized by multi-firms enterprises, often organized in multi-site networks where each firm can be managed with large autonomy. Current workflow technology does not provide the necessary functionality to model and manage such processes, mostly due to centralized structures and limited process management capabilities. In this paper some on-going efforts to approach new problems involved in distributed decoupled management architectures, based on individual autonomous agents, are presented. In particular, the scope is to verify if and when the increasing complexity of a large-scale enterprise, composed by several firms which aim to cooperate together, is going to allow a greater and greater autonomy to local decision-makers. Based on new definitions of cooperation among the agents, the opportunity of employing decoupled management architecture is analyzed, thus also giving suggestions for distributed workflow management systems.     

Distributed workflow based approach for eliminating redundancy in virtual enterprising

The existence of redundancy is a serious problem in virtual enterprise in which a number of collaborating enterprises join together to manufacture and sell a class of product for a time-limited period. This paper proposes a new approach for detection and elimination of redundancy in virtual enterprises; the proposed approach is based on workflow and uses a Petri net for modeling and simulation of workflows. This paper also presents a working example as a proof of concept.     

A characterization of workflow management systems for extreme-scale applications

Automation of the execution of computational tasks is at the heart of improving scientific productivity. Over the last years, scientific workflows have been established as an important abstraction that captures data processing and computation of large and complex scientific applications. By allowing scientists to model and express entire data processing steps and their dependencies, workflow management systems relieve scientists from the details of an application and manage its execution on a computational infrastructure. As the resource requirements of today’s computational and data science applications that process vast amounts of data keep increasing, there is a compelling case for a new generation of advances in high-performance computing, commonly termed as extreme-scale computing, which will bring forth multiple challenges for the design of workflow applications and management systems. This paper presents a novel characterization of workflow management systems using features commonly associated with extreme-scale computing applications. We classify 15 popular workflow management systems in terms of workflow execution models, heterogeneous computing environments, and data access methods. The paper also surveys workflow applications and identifies gaps for future research on the road to extreme-scale workflows and management systems.