Tracking over collaborative business processes

Abstract

Workflow monitoring is a routine function of a workflow management system for tracking the progress of running workflow instances. To keep participating organisations as autonomous entities in an inter-organisational business collaboration environment, however, it brings challenges in generating workflow tracking structures and manipulating instance correspondences between different participating organisations. Aiming to tackle these problems, this paper proposed a matrix based framework on the basis of our relative workflow model. This framework enables a participating organisation to derive tracking structures over its relative workflows and the involved relevant workflows of its partner organisations, and to perform workflow tracking with the generated tracking structures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.