Satisfaction and coherence of deadline constraints in inter-organizational workflows

Abstract

The integration of time constraints in Inter-Organizational Workflows (IOWs) is an important issue in the workflow research field. Since each partner exposes a limited version of his business process, some information is kept hidden and not visible to all partners. The inter-enterprise business process, however, is obtained by joining all activities and control flows that have relevant roles within the context of the global operation. It should be noted that this composition process does not intrinsically guarantee the satisfaction of any critical deadline constraints that may be imposed by the partners. Obviously, expressing and satisfying time deadlines is important for modern business processes that need to be optimized for efficiency and extreme competitiveness. In this paper, we propose a temporal extension to CoopFlow, an existing approach for designing and modeling IOW, based on Time Petri Net models. A method for expressing and publishing sensible time deadlines, by the partners, is given. We also give a systematic method assuring the verification and the consistency of the published time constraints within the context of the global business process, while maintaining the core advantage of CoopFlow, that each partner can keep the critical part of his business process private. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.