Loosely coupled interorganizational workflows: modeling and analyzing workflows crossing organizational boundaries

Today's corporations often must operate across organizational boundaries. Phenomena such as electronic commerce, extended enterprises, and the Internet stimulate cooperation between organizations. Therefore, it is interesting to consider workflows distributed over a number of organizations. Interorganizational workflow offers companies the opportunity to reshape business processes beyond the boundaries of their own organizations. Two important questions are addressed in this paper: (1) what are the minimal requirements any interorganizational workflow should satisfy? and (2) how does one decide whether an interorganizational workflow, modeled in terms of Petri nets, is consistent with an interaction structure specified through a message sequence chart? (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.