Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

CorPN: managing instance correspondence in collaborative business processes

  • Published:
Distributed and Parallel Databases Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Driven by the booming global business, organisations are required to align their business processes into an inter-connected network. The sophisticated nature of collaboration results in dynamic and complex interactions and correlations between participating business processes. This inevitably poses challenges to business process management in terms of recognising the instance correspondence and analysing the interaction behaviours of collaborative business processes. Nevertheless, this issue has received very limited attention from inter-organisational workflow research. In this paper, a novel correspondence Petri net model called CorPN is developed to specify instance correspondence with extensions to classical WF-Nets. In addition, a method is established to analyse the behavioural properties of CorPN nets for the purpose of process verification and examination.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Ferguson, D.F., Stockton, M.L.: Enterprise business process management–architecture, technology and standards. In: The 4th International Conference on Business Process Management, Vienna, Austria, pp. 1–15 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Khoshafian, S.: Service Oriented Enterprises. Auerbach Publications, New York (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Liu, C., Li, Q., Zhao, X.: Challenges and opportunities in collaborative business process management. Inf. Syst. Front. 11, 201–209 (2009)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  4. Weske, M., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Verbeek, H.M.W.: Advances in business process management. Data Knowl. Eng. 50, 1–8 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Samtani, G., Healey, M.J., Samtani, S.: B2B Integration: A Practical Guide to Collaborative e-Commerce. Imperial College Press, London (2002)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  6. Bussler, C.: B2B Integration. Springer, New York (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Smith, H., Fingar, P.: Business Process Management—The Third Wave. Meghan-Kiffer Press, Tampa (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Krogstie, J., Opdahl, A.L., Brinkkemper, S.: Conceptual Modelling in Information Systems Engineering. Springer, Berlin (2007)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  9. Azadeh, A., Haghnevis, M., Khodadadegan, Y.: Design of the integrated information system, business, and production process by simulation. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 59, 216–234 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Mehandjiev, N., Grefen, P.: Dynamic Business Process Formation for Instant Virtual Enterprises. Springer, Berlin (2010)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  11. Chiu, D.K.W., Karlapalem, K., Li, Q., Kafeza, E.: Workflow view based e-contracts in a cross-organizational e-services environment. Distrib. Parallel Databases 12, 193–216 (2002)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Atluri, V., Chun, S.A., Mukkamala, R., Mazzoleni, P.: A decentralized execution model for inter-organizational workflows. Distrib. Parallel Databases 22, 55–83 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. van der Aalst, W.M.P., van Hee, K.: Workflow Management Models, Methods, and Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  14. van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Kiepuszewski, B., Barros, A.P.: Workflow patterns. Distrib. Parallel Databases 14, 5–51 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M.: YAWL: Yet Another Workflow Language. Inf. Sci. 30, 245–275 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Dumas, M., ter Hofstede, A.H.M.: UML activity diagrams as a workflow specification language. In: The 4th International Conference on the Unified Modeling Language, Modeling Languages, Concepts, and Tools, Toronto, Canada, pp. 76–90 (2001)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  17. Barros, A.P., Dumas, M., ter Hofstede, A.H.M.: Service interaction patterns. In: The 3rd International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2005), Nancy, France, pp. 302–318 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Guabtni, A., Charoy, F.: Multiple instantiation in a dynamic workflow environment. In: The 16th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2004), Riga, Latvia, pp. 175–188 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Mulyar, N., Aldred, L., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: The conceptualization of a configurable multi-party multi-message request-reply conversation. In: The 9th International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications, pp. 735–753 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  20. van der Aalst, W.M.P., Barthelmess, P., Ellis, C.A., Wainer, J.: Proclets: a framework for lightweight interacting workflow processes. Int. J. Coop. Inf. Syst. 10, 443–481 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. van der Aalst, W.M.P., Barthelmess, P., Ellis, C.A., Wainer, J.: Workflow modeling using proclets. In: The 7th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, Eilat, Israel, pp. 198–209 (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Russell, D., Dew, P., Djemame, K.: Service-based collaborative workflow for DAME. In: IEEE International Conference on Service Computing, Orlando, Florida, USA, pp. 139–146 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  23. BizAgi, Wiki.BizAgi: Process Data. http://wiki.bizagi.com/en/index.php?title=Process_Data

  24. IBM, WebSphere BPM. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/au/websphere/

  25. Tibco, ActiveMatrix®BPM. http://www.tibco.com/solutions/bpm/resource-library/

  26. Andrews, T., Curbera, F., Dholakia, H., Goland, Y., Klein, J., Leymann, F., Liu, K., Roller, D., Smith, D., Thatte, S., Trickovic, I., Weerawarana, S.: Business Process Execution Language for Web Services

  27. SAP, NetWeaver Process Integration. http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-pi71

  28. IBM, WebSphere Process Sever. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/au/websphere/

  29. van der Aalst, W.M.P., Mooij, A.J., Stahl, C., Wolf, K.: Service interaction patterns, formalization, and analysis. In: The 9th International School on Formal Methods for the Design of Computer, Communication, and Software Systems, Bertinoro, Italy, pp. 42–88 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Charfi, A., Mezini, M.: AO4BPEL: an aspect-oriented extension to BPEL. World Wide Web J. 10, 309–344 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Zhao, X., Liu, C., Yang, Y., Sadiq, W.: Aligning collaborative business processes: an organisation-oriented perspective. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern., Part A, Syst. Hum. 39, 1152–1164 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Zhao, X., Liu, C.: Steering dynamic collaborations between business processes. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern., Part A, Syst. Hum. 40, 743–757 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Zhao, X., Liu, C., Yang, Y., Sadiq, W.: Handling instance correspondence in inter-organisational workflows. In: The 19th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, Trondheim, Norway, pp. 51–65 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  34. van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Verification of workflow nets. In: The 18th International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets, pp. 407–426 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Russell, N.C., ter Hofstede, A.H.M.: The language: rationale and fundamentals. In: ter Hofstede, A.H.M., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Adams, M., Russell, N.C. (eds.) Modern Business Process Automation: YAWL and Its Support Environment, pp. 23–97. Springer, Berlin (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  36. Martens, A.: Analyzing web service based business processes. In: The 8th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, Edinburgh, UK, pp. 19–33 (2005)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  37. Wong, P.Y.H., Gibbons, J.: A process-algebraic approach to workflow specification and refinement. In: 6th International Symposium on Software Composition, Braga, Portugal, pp. 51–65 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Issam, C., Schahram, D., Samir, T.: The view-based approach to dynamic inter-organizational workflow cooperation. Data Knowl. Eng. 56, 139–173 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Chiu, D.K.W., Karlapalem, K., Li, Q., Kafeza, E.: Workflow view based e-contracts in a cross-organizational e-services environment. Distrib. Parallel Databases 12(2–3), 193–216 (2002)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  40. Liu, D.R., Shen, M.: Workflow modeling for virtual processes: an order-preserving process-view approach. Inf. Sci. 28, 505–532 (2003)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  41. Schulz, K.A., Orlowska, M.E.: Facilitating cross-organisational workflows with a workflow view approach. Data Knowl. Eng. 51, 109–147 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  42. Eshuis, R., Grefen, P.: Constructing customized process views. Data Knowl. Eng. 64, 419–438 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing, Faculty of Creative Industries and Business, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Xiaohui Zhao

  2. Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

    Chengfei Liu & Yun Yang

  3. SAP Research, Brisbane, Australia

    Wasim Sadiq

Authors
  1. Xiaohui Zhao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Chengfei Liu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Yun Yang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Wasim Sadiq
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaohui Zhao.

Additional information

Communicated by Athman Bouguettaya.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Zhao, X., Liu, C., Yang, Y. et al. CorPN: managing instance correspondence in collaborative business processes. Distrib Parallel Databases 29, 309–332 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-011-7080-0

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-011-7080-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation