Modelling of Cross-Organizational Business Processes - Current Methods and Standards

Not only since the upcoming of Service-oriented Architectures the modelling of cross-organizational business processes is a heavily investigated field comprising dozens of standards based on different concepts. New techniques on the implementation site, e.g. Web Service orchestration and choreography, further extended the possibilities and requirements on such standards. To systematically order and present a comprehensive state of the art of relevant methods and standards this paper first describes requirements that occur in cross-organizational business processes both for concepts and modelling languages. Then the most important state of the art concepts for modelling cross-organizational processes are described, followed by a list of selected modelling languages. Based on the requirements defined before, a selection of languages is analysed in greater detail.