Cross-organizational business processes modeling using design-by-contract approach

Abstract

Reaching agreements between organizations in a collaborative environment is a way to ensure interoperability between these organizations at all levels. For business processes interoperability this agreement can be reached by well defining the cross-organizational process. However most BPM frameworks have used meta-models centered on flows of activities, with the data manipulated by these activities seen as second-class citizens. For business analysts (for example in complex product design collaborative environments) data plays a major role. In this paper, we propose a methodology backed by a conceptual framework to model the cross-organizational process relying on the product model. This framework defines the evolution of the product model through a finite number of states, and then automatically generates executable artifacts to support the collaboration during run-time phase. This approach is being implemented in the living laboratory provided by EADS in the context of the European project IMAGINE. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.