Web Services-based Cross-organizational Work Flow Collaborative Research

Workflow technology is the core of enterprise business processes automation. It is one of the most important technologies in improving the productivity and competitive capability of enterprises. As extension of business range, the processes involving mutilple organizations are increasing rapidly. Thus, enhancing the collaborative capability of workflow systems, and providing enough support to cross-organizational processes became a notable research field of workflow.Summing up the current works on workflow technology, this paper concludes some problems existing in collaboration of workflow systems. Introducing Web Service technology is helpful to solve the problems. After analysis of workflow-relevant technologies and specifications, the procedure and models of workflow collaboration, which are based on Web Service and workflow-view, are present. The procedure and models specify the functions and roles of the main technologies and specifications during the collaboration. Furthermore, some key technologies in the procedure and models are studied. Based on modeling collaboration scenarios, a method to generate and verificate a collaborative workflow view is proposed. The workflow views generated by this method hide the process details irrelevant to collaboration, and give out the information associated with particular business partner. This characteristic meets the demand of information exchange control well. Moreover, an extended meta-model based on WfMC's specification is proposed. According to this extended meta-model, an XPDL-based workflow language: PS-XPDL, which supports services encapsulating collaborative processes, is developed. PS-XPDL has capability to descript the relationship and data transportation between processes accurately, and can be easily implemented through the standards of WfMC. Finally, a workflow management system prototype supporting service collaboration and workflow view is designed. This prototype separates services, workflow views, and internal processes execution into three layers in order to protect private information and improve the capability of collaboration.This work proposes an approach of workflow collaboration using Web Service and workflow view technology. It enhances the collaborative capability of cross-organizational workflow in HAD environment.