Determining temporal agreements in cross-organizational business processes

Abstract

Cross-organizational business processes emerge from the cooperation of intra-organizational business processes exchanging messages. The cooperating processes establish temporal agreements in the form of constraints, representing timeliness obligations on the one hand and guarantees on the other hand. These constraints also form requirements for the design of the hidden implementation of the processes and are the basis of local control decisions. We present a comprehensive methodology for modeling the temporal aspects of cross-organizational business processes, checking the dynamic controllability of such processes, and supporting the reaching and the checking of temporal agreements. We do so by computing the consequences of temporal constraints and business secrecy requirements and by computing the weakest preconditions for the dynamic controllability of a participating process.