Modelling and Analysis Techniques for Cross-organizational Workflow Systems

Emerging e-business, e-commerce, and virtual enterprises are leading to the trend of managing workflows across organizational boundaries. A cross-organizational workflow is generally comprised of intra-organizational workflows and inter-organization workflows. The modeling techniques for the intra-organizational workflows are relatively matured. In this paper, they are briefly reviewed and contrasted to show their strong points and weaknesses. The modeling approaches for the inter-organizational workflows is emphasized and introduced in detail in this paper. The inter-organizational workflow emphasizes more on combining the workflows of different partners together and reconciling the relationships between them. Thus, the modeling approaches are described in two directions by their functions: routing languages introduced to combine individual workflows and interaction patterns proposed for collaborative partners to interact with each other. In this paper, some techniques are summarized, and some interesting research issues in the area are discussed in both technical and managerial perspectives. Copyright (c) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.