Wil van der Aalst (Eindhoven University of Technology):
Inheritance of Interorganizational Workflows to Enable Business-to-Business E-commerce
The Internet's World Wide Web has become the prime driver
of contemporary Electronic commerce (E-commerce). Although
the emphasis has moved from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
to the Internet, the focus is still on the technology
required to exchange information rather than supporting
business processes crossing organizational borders.
E-commerce is not just about facilitating individual
business transactions, it also comprises the management
of the causal relations between these transactions.
This talk stresses the process aspect of E-commerce
by relating it to workflow management. Traditional
workflow management systems assume one centralized
enactment service and have problems dealing with
dynamic changes and local variations. Since E-commerce
is characterized by interorganizational workflows
distributed over autonomous business units, the existing
systems and approaches tend to be useless in the context
of E-commerce. An approach based on inheritance of
business processes specified in terms of Petri nets is
proposed to solve some of the problems indicated. The
inheritance concepts allow for distributed modeling and
enactment with minimal coordination efforts.
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