BPM News - Folge 3

Die BPM-Kolumne des EMISA-Forums berichtet über aktuelle Themen, Projekte und Veranstaltungen aus dem BPM-Umfeld. Schwerpunkt der vorliegenden Kolumne bildet das Thema Standardisierung von Prozessbeschreibungssprachen und -notationen im Allgemeinen und BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) im Speziellen. Hierzu liefert Jan Mendling von der Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien in aktuelles Schlagwort. Des weiteren erhalten Leser eine Zusammenfassung zweier im ersten Halbjahr 2006 veranstalteten Workshops zu den Themen „Flexibilität prozessorientierter Informationssysteme“ und „Kollaborative Prozesse“ sowie einen BPM Veranstaltungskalender für die 2. Jahreshälfte 2006

Facilitating B2B E-business by IT-supported business process negotiation services

Due to the complexity of business transactions and growing business automation demands from the B2B e-business community to swiftly respond to the ever-changing environment, workflow technology has been receiving more attention recently. The increasing popularity and adoption of workflow management system (WfMS) within organisations make workflow-based B2B e-business practically viable since more and more business transactions are implemented as automated processes and executed by WfMSs. Having been viewed as services by many researchers and practitioners, process-driven B2B e-business are conducted through service discovery and runtime execution. However, if there is no existing service provided by a desired business partner that matches the requirement then such a process will have to be negotiated and then created. Unfortunately, direct people-to-people negotiation followed by manual transformation of the negotiation outcome into processdriven services can be very resource consuming. Therefore, it is identified that there is a research gap in computer-aided negotiation approach for process-driven B2B e-business. This paper introduces essentials of workflow technology and negotiation. It then describes ways of capturing elements of negotiation from an operational view point. Finally, it explains how to integrate the IT-supported negotiation services into an overall cross-organisational workflow collaboration (COWCO) supporting framework

Cross organisational compatible workflows generation and execution

With the development of internet and electronics, the demand for electronic and online commerce has increased. This has, in turn, increased the demand for business process automation. Workflow has established itself as the technology used for business process automation. Since business organisations have to work in coordination with many other business organisations in order to succeed in business, the workflows of business organisations are expected to collaborate with those of other business organisations. Collaborating organisations can only proceed in business if they have compatible workflows. Therefore, there is a need for cross organisational workflow collaboration. The dynamism and complexity of online and electronic business and high demand from the market leave the workflows prone to frequent changes. If a workflow changes, it has to be re-engineered as well as reconciled with the workflows of the collaborating organisations. To avoid the continuous re-engineering and reconciliation of workflows, and to reuse the existing units of work done, the focus has recently shifted from modeling workflows to automatic workflow generation. Workflows must proceed to runtime execution, otherwise, the effort invested in the build time workflow modeling is wasted. Therefore, workflow management and collaboration systems must support workflow enactment and runtime workflow collaboration. Although substantial research has been done in build-time workflow collaboration, automatic workflow generation, workflow enactment and runtime workflow collaboration, the integration of these highly inter-dependent aspects of workflow has not been considered in the literature. The research work presented in this thesis investigates the integration of these different aspects. The main focus of the research presented in this thesis is the creation of a framework that is able to generate multiple sets of compatible workflows for multiple collaborating organisations, from their OWLS process definitions and high level goals. The proposed framework also supports runtime enactment and runtime collaboration of the generated workflows

IT supported business process negotiation, reconciliation and execution for cross-organisational e-business collaboration

In modern enterprises, workflow technology is commonly used for business process automation. Established business processes represent successful business practice and become a crucial part of corporate assets. In the Internet era, electronic business is chosen by more and more organisations as a preferred way of conducting business practice. In response to the increasing demands for cross-organisational business automation, especially those raised by the B2B electronic commerce community, the concept of collaboration between automated business processes, i.e. workflow collaboration, is emerging. Otherwise, automation would be confined within individual organisations and cross-organisational collaboration would still have to be carried out manually. However, much of the previous research work overlooks the acquisition of the compatible workflows at build time and simply assumes that compatibility is achieved through face-toface negotiation followed by a design from scratch approach that creates collaborative workflows based on the agreement resulted from the negotiation. The resource-intensive and error-prone approach can hardly keep up with the pace of today’s marketplace with increasing transaction volume and complexity. This thesis identifies the requirements for cross-organisational workflow collaboration (COWCO) through an integrated approach, proposes a comprehensive supporting framework, explains the key enabling techniques of the framework, and implements and evaluates them in the form of a prototype system – COWCO-Guru. With the support of such a framework, cross-organisational workflow collaboration can be managed and conducted with reduced human effort, which will further facilitate cross-organisational e-business, especially B2B e-commerce practices

Interim research assessment 2003-2005 - Computer Science

This report primarily serves as a source of information for the 2007 Interim Research Assessment Committee for Computer Science at the three technical universities in the Netherlands. The report also provides information for others interested in our research activities

Decentralized establishment of consistent, multi-lateral collaborations

Multi-lateral collaborations are based on the interaction of several parties. In particular, each party contributes different tasks to the execution of the collaboration. The coordination of these different tasks, that is, the handling of the dependencies between the different tasks, is known as a workflow. When this coordination ensures a successful interaction between the different parties the workflow is called consistent, guaranteeing deadlock-freeness. Currently, a multi-lateral collaboration is set up by people meeting and discussing the collaboration, specifying the workflow (also called the global workflow) and checking its consistency. Afterwards the global workflow is split into parts (also called local workflows) performed by the individual parties. Following this top-down approach, the combination of the local workflow guarantees consistency of the global workflow. Applying a bottom up approach, that is, deriving global properties from local ones is known to be hard in distributed systems. Thus, the issue is to provide an approach which can determine global consistency based on local consistency decisions. Recent technologies such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) support decentralized and loosely coupled applications. In particular, parties make the provided functionality available as a service, which is maintained and controlled completely independent of a centralized coordinator. Further, the loose coupling supports the late binding of services, that is, a service requestor may decide at run-time which service provider to use for that particular collaboration. As a consequence of these decentralized decisions and the lack of a centralized coordinator, the top-down approach is not applicable to SOA, but requires a bottom up approach. Deciding consistency of a global workflow in a decentralized way requires additional local information which is provided by the method proposed in this thesis. In particular, information on parameter constraints and execution sequences between local workflows has to be exchanged and propagated through the collaboration to gather sufficient information. It is shown that this propagated information suffices to determine global workflow consistency in a decentralized way. Further, Web Services are used as a concrete technology supporting the SOA paradigm and the theoretical results are applied to this technology as a proof of concept to illustrate the applicability of the approach presented. The approach can be applied to synchronous or asynchronous communication models. While there already exist approaches for asynchronous communication models, there are none available for the synchronous case. Therefore, a formal model for synchronous communication is introduced which is called annotated Finite State Automata. This model extends standard Finite State Automata by annotating states with logical expressions to differentiate between mandatory and optional automata transitions. An optional transition can be illustrated by a party providing the option to receive one of two messages, where the interacting party may use one of the options. Optional transitions represent standard automata semantics. However, a mandatory transition can be illustrated by a party sending either one of two messages, where the receiving party is required to support both options, because supporting only a single option results in a deadlock if the sender selects the other option. This formal model is introduced and discussed in detail for bilateral and multi-lateral collaborations. In particular, the propagation of parameter constraints and execution sequences are defined based on this model and the construction of the corresponding global workflow is introduced. For the asynchronous communication model, Workflow Nets are used as a formal model based on an existing approach to constructing the corresponding global workflow. However, since the computational complexity of Workflow Nets prevents satisfactory application of the propagation definitions, the execution sequences of the Workflow Nets involved are represented as annotated Finite State Automata and thus allow handling of the synchronous and asynchronous communication model based on a single formal model, that is, annotated Finite State Automata. Based on the common formal model, it can be shown that the propagation of parameter constraints and execution sequence constraints result in a fixed point, where further propagation will not change the local workflow any further. Based on this fixed point, it can be shown that if all parties decide locally that the workflow is consistent then the global workflow is also consistent. Therefore, the final consistency decision is based on the consensus of the parties' local consistency decisions. The approach is implemented within the Web Services framework. In particular, a partial mapping of the Web Service process specification language (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL)) to annotated Finite State Automata is provided. Based on this mapping an extension of standard service discovery, considering process descriptions in terms of BPEL, is implemented. Further, the relevant operations for annotated Finite State Automata are implemented. Finally, in order to be able to apply the approach presented, a decentralized collaboration establishment approach is introduced

Overview on Decentralized Establishment of Consistent Multi-lateral Collaborations based on Asynchronous Communication

Service oriented architectures facilitate loosely coupled collaborations, which are established in a decentralized way. One challenge for such collaborations is to guarantee consistency, that is, fulfillment of all constraints of individual services and deadlock-freeness. This paper introduces a decentralized approach to consistency checking, which utilizes only bilateral views of the collaboration