Equivalence Transformations on Interorganizational Processes to Shift Communication Steps

Distributed interorganizational processes can be designed by first creating a global process, which is then split into processes or views for each participant. Existing methods for automating this transformation concentrate on the control flow and neglect either the data flow or address it only partially. Even for small interorganizational processes, there is a considerably large number of potential realizations of the data flow. We analyze the problem of generating message exchanges to realize the dataflow in depth and present a solution for constructing data flows which are optimal with respect to some design objectives. The approach is based on a definition of the correctness of data flow and a complete set of transformations which preserve correctness and allow to search for an optimal solution from a generated correct solution.