CoopFlow: A Framework for Inter-organizational Workflow Cooperation

The work we present here is in line with a novel approach for inter-organizational workflow cooperation spanning several organizations without being managed by one physical organization. Our approach consists of three steps: workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection, and workflow cooperation. Hence, to implement a virtual organization it is important to provide a mechanism whereby organizations can advertise their workflow parts, other organizations can look at them and cooperate these with their own workflows. In this paper, we present

CoopFlow

, a workflow cooperation framework, supporting dynamic plugging and cooperation between heterogeneous workflow management systems (WfMS). Can be connected to

CoopFlow

any WfMS that is able to invoke external applications (programs, Web services, etc.) and that allows external applications to invoke any step within a workflow it manages.

CoopFlow

presents many advantages. First, it provides powerful ways for inter-organizational workflow cooperation and code reduction. In fact, partners can change their WfMS without changing the global proxy behaviour. Furthermore, it permits a dynamic interconnection and disconnection of participating organizations. In addition, it preserves the privacy and autonomy of process participants by reducing inter-visibility as tiny as the cooperation needs based on the view principle. Finally, our framework preserves established workflows : participants don’t modify their internal systems. Instead, they have just to implement a proxy to integrate

CoopFlow

.