CrossFlow: Cross-Organizational Workflow Management for Service Outsourcing in Dynamic Virtual Enterprises

In this report, we present the approach to cross-organizational workflow management of the CrossFlow project. CrossFlow is a European research project aiming at the support of cross-organizational workflows in dynamic virtual enterprises. The cooperation in these virtual enterprises is based on dynamic service outsourcing specified in electronic contracts. Service enactment is performed by dynamically linking the workflow management infrastructures of the involved organizations. Extended service enactment support is provided in the form of cross-organizational transaction management and process control, advanced quality of service monitoring, and support for high-level flexibility in service enactment. CrossFlow technology is realized on top of a commercial workflow management platform and applied in two real-world scenarios in the contexts of a logistics and an insurance company

CrossFlow: Cross-Organizational Workflow Management in Dynamic Virtual Enterprises

In this report, we present the approach to cross-organizational workflow\ud management of the CrossFlow project. CrossFlow is a European research\ud project aiming at the support of cross-organizational workflows in dynamic\ud virtual enterprises. The cooperation in these virtual enterprises is based on\ud dynamic service outsourcing specified in electronic contracts. Service enactment\ud is performed by dynamically linking the workflow management infrastructures\ud of the involved organizations. Extended service enactment support is provided in the form of cross-organizational transaction management and process control, advanced quality of service monitoring, and support for high-level flexibility in service enactment. CrossFlow technology is realized on top of a commercial workflow management platform and applied in two real-world scenarios in the contexts of a logistics and an insurance company

Visualisation of Distributed Systems Visualisation of Distributed Systems

This paper presents a model of the visualization process and discusses the problems associated with the process of visualization of distributed systems. The problems can be divided into those concerned with incomplete information, and those concerned with unexpected information arriving from the monitored system. Solutions to these problems are introduced and are used to obtain guidelines for the designer of distributed systems and for the designer of a visualization tool

Data Management for an Enhanced Trader Data Management for an Enhanced Trader

As the world moves toward large, heterogeneous, federated, distributed computing systems, the problems of matching up diverse clients and servers for interoperation take on increasing importance. “Trading ” is a partial solution, allowing clients to locate, at run time, servers which meet stated constraints on interface type and certain other types of properties. However, matching will need to take place at earlier phases in the application life cycle as well, and will need to be based on much more complex constraints involving properties such as charging & billing policies, security & privacy policies, operation semantics, performability guarantees, etc. This indicates the need for “enhanced traders ” (for lack of a better term) which maintain a very broad range of information on services and provide very flexible access to it. This paper describes plans for an “enhanced trader ” prototype, which will support a complex, extensible data model and query language access by clients. Issues discussed include: (1) reasons for selecting a relational DBMS over an object DBMS for the trader repository, (2) techniques used to support a complex data model with dynamic extensibility, and (3) techniques used to support remote query language access in an object based open distributed system