DynaFlow: A Dynamic Inter-Organizational Workflow Management System

As the global marketplace becomes more and more competitive, business organizations often need to team up and operate as a virtual enterprise in order to utilize the best of their resources for achieving their common business goals. Since the business environment of a virtual enterprise is highly dynamic, it is necessary to develop a workflow management technology that is capable of handling dynamic workflows across enterprise boundaries. This paper describes a dynamic workflow model (DWM) and a dynamic workflow management system (DynaFlow) for modeling and controlling the execution of inter-organizational business processes. DWM enables the specification of dynamic properties associated with a business process model. It extends the underlying model of the WfMC’s WPDL by adding connectors, events, triggers, and rules as its modeling constructs, encapsulating activity definitions, and allowing e-service requests to be included as a part of the activity specification. Using DWM as the underlying model, DynaFlow makes use of an event and rule server to trigger rules during the enactment of a workflow process to enforce business constraints and policies and/or to modify the process model at run-time. A constraint-based, dynamic service binding mechanism is used to dynamically bind e-service requests to e-services that satisfy some constraint specifications. Index Items: dynamic workflow model, dynamic workflow management system, business process, e-service, e-service constraint, e-service request constraint, business event, business rule, dynamic service binding.