Semantic Workflow Interoperability

A workkow consists of a collection of activities which support a speciic business process; classical examples range from claim management in an insurance company to production scheduling in a manufacturing company to patient care management and support within an hospital. In conventional workkow systems, each business process is separately speciied and autonomously supported by a workkow management system , which drives and assists computer-supported activities. However, business processes often interact with each other; in particular, activities which are performed in the context of one process may innuence activities of a diierent process in a way that, laying \between" the two processes, is quite diicult to formalize and understand. Therefore, a new challenging area for research consists of studying the process of workkow interoperability, i.e. to focus on the interactions among workkows which are autonomously and separately speciied, yet need each other's support. This paper is focused on the semantic spec-iication of workkow interoperability, and provides a classiication of \modes of interaction" and of the semantic properties of cooperating workkows. We introduce some topological properties of cooperative work-ows, e.g. reachability, deadlock and starvation, and discuss \workkow integration", i.e. links established between workkows that allow us to view an integrated process from its component processes.