Abstract
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. To apply workflow management technology in these virtual enterprises, support for cross-organizational processes is necessary. 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 transaction model and architecture for cross-organizational workflow processes. Characteristic of the model is the flexibility in rollback semantics by combining rollback modes and rollback scopes, supported by a dynamically generated architecture that is configured conforming to an electronic contract that has been established between the different organizations. The transaction model and architecture are independent of the underlying workflow management system platform, however, in the CrossFlow project the presented technology is being implemented on top of IBM’s MQ Series Workflow.
The work presented in this paper is supported by the European Commission in the CrossFlow Project (ESPRIT No. 28635). Partners in CrossFlow are IBM Zurich Research Labs in Switzerland, IBM France, SEMA Group sae. in Spain, Church and General in Ireland, GMD-IPSI and IBM Böblingen in Germany, KPN Research and University of Twente in the Netherlands.
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Vonk, J., Derks, W., Grefen, P., Koetsier, M. (2000). Cross-Organizational Transaction Support for Virtual Enterprises. In: Scheuermann, P., Etzion, O. (eds) Cooperative Information Systems. CoopIS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1901. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10722620_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10722620_30
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