Research On Workflow Modeling Technology In Virtual Enterprise

Competitive markets force companies to minimize their costs while at the same time offering solutions which are tailored to the needs of their customers. This requires organizations to outsource at least parts of the overall effort and to rely on services which have to be provided by external partners, leading ultimately to virtual enterprises. The workflow concept has been very successful in coordinating and streamlining business processes but is so far limited to a single organization. On the other hand, the tremendous growth of global networks like the internet provide the possibility to efficiently exchange data and communicate with a large number of possible service providers and service requesters. The extension of workflow management systems to manage Virtual Enterprise business processes therefore seems to be a promising solution.However, the extension of workflows beyond the borders of a single enterprise raises new challenges. To address these problems, there are some modelings about workflow in Virtual Enterprise proposed, such as collaborative modeling in workflow, supply chain modeling in workflow, workflow model based on agent and object-oriented workflow modeling in Virtual Enterprise etc. However there are some shortcomings and improvements, such as online data acquisition and analyze, dynamic optimization in process. This article proposes a service-oriented model for Virtual Enterprise workflows. Modeling the workflow execution as a cooperation of services allows different organizations to interact via well-defined interfaces. This article further shows how the execution can be optimized by selecting services depending on their contribution to quality criteria of the workflow. The model proposed in this article provides a cognition and sample method for building Virtual Enterprise.