A process-view approach for cross-organizational workflows management

Workflow management for cross-organizational business processes presents a significant challenge recently. The development and implementation of new methodologies and technologies are imperative to tackle this challenge. The process-view approach provides a promising way to facilitate cross-organizational workflows management, especially when it is combined with powerful workflow modeling methods. With the assumption that workflow modeling methods in cooperative organizations are inter-operable, a process-view and timed colored Petri net (TCPN) combined approach is proposed to manage cross-organizational workflows, including the formal definition, the mapping from TCPN workflow models to process-view workflow models in which the aspects of control flow and data flow are considered together, and the collaborative execution mechanisms of cross-organizational workflow instances. A hybrid P2P based decentralized workflow management system (WMS) combined with the process-view approach is proposed and built, which is placed on the top of the open JXTA platform and provides a flexible and scalable architecture for cross-organizational workflows management. At last, the cross-organizational workflows management for the distributed development of a circular saw has been used as a test case for system validation. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.