Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Product-Based Workflow Design for Monitoring
of Collaborative Business Processes
Marco Comuzzi and Irene T.P. Vanderfeesten
School of Industrial Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology
P.O. Box 513, 5600MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
{m.comuzzi,i.t.p.vanderfeesten}@tue.nl
Abstract.
Monitoring of cross-organizational processes requires the def-
inition and implementation of monitoring processes that can deliver the
right information to the right party in the collaboration. Monitoring
processes should account for the temporal and aggregation dependencies
among the monitoring information made available by the set of collabo-
rating parties. We solve the problem of designing monitoring processes in
collaborative settings using Product-Based Workflow Design (PBWD).
We first discuss a methodology to apply PBWD in this context and then
propose an architecture to implement the methodology using a service-
oriented approach.
Keywords:
Monitoring, business process design, cross-organizational
processes.
1
Introduction
Continuous monitoring of a business process can be defined as the set of method-
ology and tools to collect and disseminate relevant information about the process
execution to interested stakeholders simultaneously with, or within a reasonably
short period after, the occurrence of relevant events in the process [6]. Continu-
ous monitoring has straightforward benefits, such as the opportunity for process
providers to detect anomalies in (almost) real time and apply control actions
on-the-fly.
Research on (continuous) monitoring in cross-organizational processes has
usually taken an
information-centric
perspective, focusing on the definition of
monitoring requirements for the collaborating parties and their evolution [6,11],
the design of architectures and tools to capture monitoring information [17], the
detection of contract violations, given the available monitoring information [3], or
the verification of the compliance of execution logs to a process specification [18].
Although the information-centric view can suce for intra-organizational pro-
cess monitoring, where all monitoring information is produced in a given busi-
ness domain, in cross-organizational settings researchers stress the importance
of process- and communication-oriented mechanisms to transmit relevant infor-
mation to interested parties across the collaborative network [7,11]. In other
words, once the monitoring information is captured and made available by the
