Cross-organizational Workflow Management - Models, Languages ​​and Systems

Much of the practice and research in Workflow has taken place within the confines of a single organization. However, today's administrative work is often not confined within a single set of organizational walls. The increasing popularity of joint ventures, cross-organization groups is evidence of this. Modern business activity is characterized by a growing number of organisational boundaries, across which management must negotiate supply or service contract and also exchange information. There is no globalization standard in the research field of cross-organization workflow. Though WfMC(Workflow Management Coalition) has present some specifications, it is far from enough.This disserttation puts forward a cross-organization workflow model including resource model, process model and data transfer model. For expressing the model, we modify XRL ( eXchangeable Rout i ng Language ) , which is a XML-based workflow definition language. COWFMS (Cross Organ i zat i on WorkFlow Management System) is a Workflow Management System supporting expended XRL, which extremely satisfies the requirement of cross enterprise business cooperation.In the 1st chapter, we introduce workflow briefly to make the readers understand the development and application of workflow technology and some relevant concepts. We also explain the background in the research field of cross-organization workflow.In the 2nd chapter, A cross-organization workflow model is brought out. Unchanging the inner-organization workflow, our model is constructed on an abstract level, which can be mapped into workflow processes of each organization while working.In the 3rd chapter, we expand XRL to express the model metioned above. We add resource management and organization service parts to it.In the 4th chapter, the expanded XRL is translated into workflow net (which is one of the variations of Petri net), thus we can take the advantage of the theory results of workflow analysis and verification based on workflow net.In the 5th chapter, we explain the implementation of COWFMS system. After introducing the function and architecture of COWFMS, we give some of the typical operations on the system.In the end, all of the works in this dissertation are summed up, and their futures are prospected.