Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Petri Net Based Behavior Description
of Cross-Organization Workflow
with Synchronous Interaction Pattern
Cong Liu
1,2
, Qingtian Zeng
2,3
, Hua Duan
4
, and Faming Lu
1,2
1
The Key Laboratory of Embedded System and Service Computing,
Ministry of Education, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
2
College of Information Science and Engineering,
Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China
3
College of Electronic Communication,
Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China
4
College of Mathematics, Shandong University of Science and Technology,
Qingdao 266590, China
{liucongchina,qtzeng,huaduan59,fm_lu}@163.com
Abstract.
Today's workflow systems are crossing organizational boundaries
and usually involve multiple organizations or partners, and the cross-
organization workflow has received much public attention from both the
academia and the industry. This way the property analysis as well as system
control for a cross-organization workflow is very important. In this paper, we
focus on a kind of loosely coupled workflow architecture with synchronous in-
teraction pattern, i.e. each organization owns its private workflow process and
can operate independently, and they need to synchronize through certain tasks.
Its behavior description approach is obtained using the synchronized shuffle
operation of Petri net language. It is proved that our approach benefits the be-
havior characterization of cross-organizational workflow with synchronous
interaction pattern and can be further used to decide and control the fairness,
liveness, deadlock and trap for the cross-organization workflow. A running case
of cross-organizational medical diagnosis workflow is given to validate our
approaches throughout the whole paper.
Keywords:
Cross-organization workflow, Synchronous Interaction Pattern,
Behavior Description, Petri Net Language.
1
Introduction
With the ever-accelerated development of modern information system, more and more
business processes are crossing organizational boundaries and calling for multiple
organizations to corporate [1]. This way the cross-organization workflow has received
much public attention from both the academia and the industry. To support the cross-
organizational workflows, several conceptual architectures, including capacity sharing,
chained execution, subcontracting, case transfer, extended case transfer and loosely
coupled, are surveyed by Aalst [2]. This work focuses on a kind of loosely coupled
