Cross organisational compatible plans generation framework

In this modern era, organisations have to work in coordination with many other organisations in order to succeed in business. Interacting organisations can only proceed in business if they have compatible workflows. This paper proposes a framework to automatically generate compatible workflows for multiple interacting organisations from their process definitions and service descriptions. Existing systems can reconcile existing workflows only, and cannot generate compatible workflows for multiple organisations automatically. The proposed system is different from existing systems since it targets workflow collaboration by generating workflows automatically. This allows the organisations to save the time that would otherwise be spent in modelling workflows and making them compatible with the workflows of interacting organisations

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

mPower: A component-based development framework for multi-agent systems to support business processes

One of the obstacles preventing the widespread adoption of multi-agent systems in industry is the difficulty of implementing heterogeneous interactions among participating agents via asynchronous messages. This difficulty arises from the need to understand how to combine elements of various content languages, ontologies, and interaction protocols in order to construct meaningful and appropriate messages. In this paper mPower, a component-based layered framework for easing the development of multi-agent systems, is described, and the facility for customising the components for reuse in similar domains is explained. The framework builds on the JADE-LEAP platform, which provides a homogeneous layer over diverse operating systems and hardware devices, and allows ubiquitous deployment of applications built on multi-agent systems both in wired and wireless environments. The use of the framework to develop mPowermobile , a multi-agent system to support mobile workforces, is reported

Cross-organisational workflow enactment via progressive linking by run-time agents

Driven by popular adoptions of workflow and requirements from the practice of virtual enterprise (VE), research in workflow interoperability is currently on the increase. Nonetheless, it is still in its early stage compared with the maturity of individual workflow technology. Some attempts have been tried, however results are not satisfactory especially in a VE context, where many of the partnerships are dynamic and temporary. Reasons include the rigidity and high initial coordination cost inherently associated with top-down modelling and enactment approaches. Therefore, this paper proposes a bottom-up and WfMS 1 Keywords: Multi-Agent Systems, Workflow Interoperability, Virtual Enterprise -independent approach towards cross-organisational workflow enactment, which is via progressive linking enabled by run-time agents. This is expected to pave the way for further cross-organisational workflow needs

Towards Connecting Online Interfacing and Internal Core Business Processes

Nowadays, organisations tend to do more business online by enabling their business processes to interact with customers, suppliers, etc., via different online channels. On the other hand, their core business processes, such as production, engineering, etc., may still stay inside the organisation. As a consequence, this makes an organisation rely on the collaboration between these two types of business processes to conduct its business, and this collaboration brings issues like multiple instance correlation, process view, and process evolution, to the business process management (BPM) of the organisation. This paper reports our research in progress on these issues. It firstly identifies the requirements to fully support such collaboration, and then presents a framework to illustrate how the collaboration can be facilitated using latest BPM technologies. This framework provides a reference architecture to incorporating online interfacing and internal core business processes

Report of the user requirements and web based access for eResearch workshops

The User Requirements and Web Based Access for eResearch Workshop, organized jointly by NeSC and NCeSS, was held on 19 May 2006. The aim was to identify lessons learned from e-Science projects that would contribute to our capacity to make Grid infrastructures and tools usable and accessible for diverse user communities. Its focus was on providing an opportunity for a pragmatic discussion between e-Science end users and tool builders in order to understand usability challenges, technological options, community-specific content and needs, and methodologies for design and development. We invited members of six UK e-Science projects and one US project, trying as far as possible to pair a user and developer from each project in order to discuss their contrasting perspectives and experiences. Three breakout group sessions covered the topics of user-developer relations, commodification, and functionality. There was also extensive post-meeting discussion, summarized here. Additional information on the workshop, including the agenda, participant list, and talk slides, can be found online at http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/685/ Reference: NeSC report UKeS-2006-07 available from http://www.nesc.ac.uk/technical_papers/UKeS-2006-07.pd

A cross organisation compatible workflows generation and execution framework

With the development of the Internet, the demand for electronic and online commerce has increased. This has, in turn, increased the demand for business process automation. In this paper, we look at the use of workflows for business process automation. An automatically generated workflow can save time and resources needed for running online businesses. In general, due to the interdependencies between their activities, multiple business organisations will need to work together by collaborating and coordinating their activities with each other. This gives rise to the need for workflow collaboration across organisations. Current systems for workflow collaboration are only capable of reconciling existing workflows of the collaborating organisations. Automatic workflow generation systems only generate workflows for individual organisations and cannot handle the automatic generation of compatible workflows for multiple collaborating organisations. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we present a framework that is able to generate multiple sets of compatible workflows for multiple collaborating organisations. The proposed framework supports runtime enactment and runtime collaboration of the generated workflows. This framework enables users to save the time and resources that would otherwise be spent in modelling, reconciling and reengineering workflows

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

Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design Institutional Story

The principal outputs of the PiP Project surround the Course and Class Approval (C-CAP) system. This web-based system built on Microsoft SharePoint addresses and resolves many of the issues identified by the project. Generally well received by both academic and support staff, the system provides personalised views, adaptive forms and contextualised support for all phases of the approval process. Although the system deliberately encapsulates and facilitates existing approval processes thus achieving buy-in, it is already achieving significant improvements over the previous processes, not only in reducing the administrative overheads but also in supporting curriculum design and academic quality. The system is now embedded across three faculties and is now considered by the University of Strathclyde to be a "core institutional service". Alongside the C-CAP system the PiP Project also cultivated a suite of approaches: an incremental systems development methodology; a structured and replicable evaluation approach, and; Strathclyde's Lean Approach to Efficiencies in Education Kit (SLEEK) business process improvement methodology Each is based on recognised formal techniques, providing the basis for a rigorous approach. This is contextualised within and adapted to the HE institutional context thus building the foundation not only for the project but ultimately for institution wide process improvement. This "institutional story" report summarises the principal outcomes of the Project