Negotiating Temporal Commitments in Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Abstract

Cross-organizational business processes emerge from the cooperation of intra-organizational business processes through exchange of messages. The involved parties agree on communication protocols, which contain in particular temporal constraints: as obligations on one hand, and as guarantees on the other hand. These constraints form also requirements for the design of the hidden implementation of the processes and are the basis for control decisions for each party. We present a comprehensive methodology for modeling the temporal aspects of cross-organizational business processes, checking dynamic controllability of such processes, and supporting the negotiation of temporal commitments. We do so by computing the consequences of temporal constraints in choreographies, and by computing the weakest preconditions for the dynamic controllability of a participating process