Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1: Graphical representation of an inter-organizational process model
Management Coalition, 1998). The
activity
is a logical and independent piece of work and
the
work transition
represents a fl ow of a business process among activities. To support
process enactment and role assignment, additional constructs such as an execution rule and
organization structure need to be defi ned (Amghar, 2000; Workfl ow Management Coalition,
1998). However, since the goal of this chapter is process information sharing among different
organizations that focuses on the monitoring of a global process status, we view a process
model as consisting of a number of activities and their associating work transitions.
Figure 1 graphically represents the basic concepts of an inter-organizational process
model. As notations to depict an inter-organizational process model,
PM
i
denotes the i-th
participating local process model and
A
i,j
denotes the j-th activity of PM
i
. In the two local
process models, PM
1
and PM
2
, constituting the inter-organizational process, the circle denotes
an activity and the solid arrow between circles denotes a
trigger
that represents the order of
a work transition. The dotted arrow denotes message movement, representing an interaction
between different process models. In addition, PM
1
considers PM
2
as a remote sub-process
and uses a local activity, A
1,3
, to represent the activities of PM
2
. Such an activity is called a
process activity
. The message from A
1,3
causes the start of PM
2
; A
1,3
is suspended during
the execution of PM
2
; after receiving the returned message from PM
2
, A
1,3
terminates.
Figure 1 also shows fi ve kinds of work transitions, including AND-SPLIT, AND-JOIN,
OR-SPLIT, OR-JOIN, and SERIAL (Leymann, 2000; Workfl ow Management Coalition,
1998). The black dot between solid arrows denotes a discriminator to distinguish AND-JOIN
from OR-JOIN, and AND-SPLIT from OR-SPLIT. Consider the activity A
1,1
as an example
in Figure 1. When A
1,1
terminates, both A
1,2
and A
1,3
follow in parallel (we denote this as
AND-SPLIT
); when both A
1,2
and A
1,3
terminate, A
1,4
follows (
AND-JOIN
). On the other
hand, when A
2,1
terminates, only one activity among A
2,2
and A
2,3
follows (
OR-SPLIT
); when
either A
2,2
or A
2,3
terminates, A
2,4
follows (
OR-JOIN
). When A
2,4
terminates, A
2,5
follows
without any other splitting or joining activities (
SERIAL
).
