Informatica

Inter-Organizational Workflow (IOW) aims at supporting the collaboration between several autonomous and heterogeneous business processes, distributed over different enterprises or organizations. Coordination of these processes is a fundamental issue that has been mainly addressed in a static context, but it still remains open in a dynamic one such as the Internet in which IOW applications are more and more enacted nowadays. In such a context, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are known to be a natural solution for modeling IOW since they provide adequate abstractions and specific mediators to cope with IOW coordination. Consequently, this paper provides an agent-based model for coordinating business processes involved in a dynamic IOW. This model is a triplet (E, M, R). E is the set of coordinated entities. It corresponds to the different business processes that may be published, discovered or deployed by IOW partners. M is the media supporting coordination. It is a multi-agent architecture compliant with the Workflow Management Coalition architecture and integrating specific components devoted to coordination issues. Finally, R is the set of rules governing the coordination. In our context, R is described through an organizational model aiming at structuring the interaction among the coordinated entities and the different components of the architecture.

Business process engineering is an important part of the advanced enterprise engineering. One of the still open issues is the question how in the enterprise system design to reuse ontological knowledge about business processes. The paper proposes to consider a family of similar business processes as a generic process and to represent knowledge about generic processes in a domain independent way. It describes the main scheme for reuse of such a domain independent knowledge when developing enterprise-wide information systems (IS). The main attention is paid to the process configuration problem. In order to solve this problem, a configurator (human being or machine) must find a set of components that fit together to satisfy the problem specification. An approach based on Description Logics is proposed for this aim. The main contribution of the paper is the proposed process configuration technique.