Supporting workflow cooperation within and across organizations

This paper presents a model and system that enable cooperation between workflows executed in the same or in different organizations. We extend traditional workflow models by allowing workflows to publish and subscribe to events, and by enabling the definition of points in the process execution where events should be sent or received. Event notifications are managed by a suitable event service that is capable of filtering and correlating events, and of dispatching them to the appropriate target workflow instances. The extended model can be easily mapped onto any workflow model, since event specific constructs can be specified by means of ordinary workflow activities, for which we provide the implementation. In addition, the event service is easily portable to different platforms, and does not require integration with the WfMS that supports the cooperating workflows. Therefore, the proposed approach is applicable in virtually any environment and is independent on the specific platform adopted.