This paper presents a novel approach to inter-organizational workflow cooperation. Our goal is to provide support for organizations which are involved in a shared but not pre-modeled cooperative workflow across organizational boundaries. Our approach allows for partial visibility of workflows and their resources, thus providing powerful ways for inter-organizational workflow configuration. Varying degrees of visibility of workflows enable organizations to retain required levels of privacy and security of internal workflows. Our presented view concept provides a high degree of flexibility for participating organizations, since internal structures of collaborative workflows may be adapted without changes in the inter-organizational workflows. Furthermore, we provide workflow participants with the freedom to change their workflows without changing their roles in the cooperation. This increases flexibility and is an important step to increase e#ciency as well as reduction in costs for inter-organizational workflows. The presented approach is inspired by the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Accordingly, our approach consists of three steps: workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection, and workflow cooperation.

Abstract. Developing a collaboration solution, that scales to an entire organization, that offers an integrated collection of cooperation tools, that is general enough to address a large range of applications, and that is easy to deploy for most people, is still an open challenge. This paper presents ToxicFarm services that are an integral part of a framework for hosting Internet virtual teams. The originality of this work is in providing a synthesis between contributions from different domains, including version management in software engineering, process management in data engineering, and awareness in groupware tools. The paper describes the overall services offered, discusses design choices for their integration and implementation, presents relations with existing work and describes their use in several emerging e-business application domains, such as e-finance, e-learning and e-telecom.

Abstract: Many E-business applications are based on increased cooperation between various organisational units and partners. System support for such applications can be provided using concepts from the area of service oriented computing – thus lifting inter-organisational integration to a higher level of effectiveness and efficiency. E-services provide means for modularisation of arbitrary organisational assets into components that can be dynamically offered, discovered, negotiated, accessed, and composed in an open application environment. Technically, E-services are software systems that are implemented on top of conventional information and communication technology. As an important step into that direction, Web Services have laid the foundation for interoperable communication between arbitrary systems. This paper introduces an approach to plan, build, and run such application-level services efficiently. Therefore, a fundamental notion of service, originating from distributed systems, is being extended by a specific concept of cooperative interaction processes. Accordingly, an application-level service model and corresponding service engineering mechanisms are proposed and realised as system software middleware based on OGSA Web Services and BPEL4WS processes.

Abstract — The application of collaborative commerce in enterprises cluster will further improve the competitive competences of the individual enterprises. This paper analyses the advantages that collaborative commerce brings after it has been applied in enterprises cluster. And then a framework used to describe the operation of collaborative commerce in enterprises cluster is put forward. Directed by this framework, an implementation solution is proposed to building the collaborative commerce system in enterprises cluster. The paper also fully describes the realizing technologies from three aspects that construct the intelligent search engine, create the application service environment that supports the enterprises interaction and build the collaborative commerce information portal.

The pursuit of lower cost, shorter time-to-market, and better quality has led to a shift toward global production in today’s competitive business environment. This shift, however, forces manufacturing enterprises to have separate design houses and manufacturing facilities. In general, design houses are located in the same regions as customers to enable them to respond to the rapidly changing demands of customers. By contrast, manufacturing facilities can be placed in regions in which production costs are lower. However, this physical and logical separation between designers and manufacturers (or between upstream manufacturers and downstream manufacturers) raises various integration issues. The present paper addresses two of these issues: the framework for representing the data necessary to communicate requirements and objectives of the designer, and the methodology for utilizing such data to optimize the business objectives related to production cost and quality. The proposed representation, collaboration framework, and methodology will enable design houses and manufacturing facilities to realize the benefits of global production and to accommodate the management of loosely integrated supply chains.

In the context of inter-organizational workflows, interactions between partners should be constructive, complementary, and guide the work toward the objective of organizations involved in the workflow. Within our approach, inter-organizational workflow cooperation, which consists of workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection and workflow cooperation, this paper focuses on these cooperation policies one has to define in order to enforce and control interactions between partners' workflows. The cooperation policies integrate the partners' roles as well as their coordination, the dataflows allowed to pass from one partner's workflow to another, and their intervisibility levels. The level of the visibility is used to preserve the partner privacy and know-how and is reduced as tiny as cooperation needs.

c t i v it y e p o r t 2009 Table of contents