Specification error detection and dynamic interoperation support for inter-organizational workflow

Abstract

As the needs for interconnections of workflows in different companies or departments are so increasing and companies try to realize business processes across organizational boundaries, it is required for workflow system to support inter-organizational workflow. In the inter-organizational workflow, the correctness issues of workflow specification are important because a workflow definition that contains errors might lead to angry trading partners and loss of goodwill. On the other hand, in spite of correct specification, inter-organizational workflow might not fulfill the design goal of virtual process at runtime because the companies participate in a virtual enterprise are not controlled by single manager and businesses of a virtual enterprise operate on very dynamic environment. In this dissertation, we propose a workflow system enables a correct specification and dynamic enactment service for interoperation among organizations. For correct specification, we develop languages and static analysis methods that are, because of declarative program analysis, simpler and more intuitive than other analysis methods. The run time enactment service for dynamic environment is designed and implemented based on distributed object system. In the case of inter-organizational workflow definition, latent communication deadlock probably leads the workflow instances to be permanently blocked. For the specification of inter-organizational workflow, we define Community Process Definition Language(CPDL). This language borrows structural constructs and provides basic syntactic elements for control flows that are necessary to present the interactions among workflows. For detecting latent communication deadlock, we adopt set based constraint system developed in programming language society. This analysis mechanism clarifies explicit dependence between activities and eventually detects a communication deadlock that is latent in a community process definition. For another issue of ...