Business Process Composition
This chapter describes the realization of the business process composition cluster in the CrossWork architecture. Business process composition is concerned with automated means for constructing business processes in a dynamically forged virtual organizati
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Business Process Composition Rik Eshuis and Alex Norta
This chapter describes the realization of the business process composition cluster in the CrossWork architecture. Business process composition is concerned with automated means for constructing business processes in a dynamically forged virtual organization. A business process is operationalized in a workflow, which can be supported by workflow management technology. We first introduce several perspectives for business process collaborations and discuss how they relate to each other. Next, the languages used for process specification are presented. We examine the workflow composition module, which provides support for (semi-) automatic composition of global workflows from local workflows of members in a VE. Before a composed workflow can be used in practice, it needs to be tested – this is discussed in the next subsection. The interfaces used for the transfer of a composed workflow to its execution environment are subsequently discussed in this chapter.
7.1 Perspectives for Business Process Collaboration Collaboration among business processes can be supported by linking the underlying workflow management systems that are responsible for executing the corresponding local workflows. To connect local workflows in an appropriate way, several conflicting issues have to be balanced. For privacy and security reasons, each partner wishes to shield as much as possible of its own internal local workflow. To collaborate, however, each partner has to expose some details of its internal process, to inform its team partners about the local progress so that the global progress can be tracked. Therefore, we distinguish between two visibility levels for local workflows; the conceptual (internal) level and the external level. The external-level workflow is visible to the partner and the outside world whereas the internal-level workflow is only visible to the partner doing the workflow. This way, the partner doing the local workflow can hide internal details from the local workflow from the outside world. However, the external-level workflow is an abstract and coarse-grained R. Eshuis (B) Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] N. Mehandjiev, P. Grefen (eds.), Dynamic Business Process Formation for Instant Virtual Enterprises, Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing, C Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010 DOI 10.1007/978-1-84882-691-5_7,
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version of the internal-level workflow, so the external-level workflow does offer valid information on the progress of the internal workflow to other partners. Another important concept is workflow perspective [23]. A perspective is a particular angle from which a workflow is regarded. Important perspectives for traditional (intra-organizational) workflows are the control flow, data flow, resource and transaction perspective. Control flow focuses on the temporal ordering of tasks, so it answers the question when each task is to be done. Data flow focuses on
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