Cross-Organizational Transaction Support for Virtual Enterprises

In recent years, workflow management systems have become an accepted technology to support automation in process-centric environments. Lately, organizations concentrate more and more on their core business processes while outsourcing supporting processes to other organizations, thereby forming virtual enterprises. To apply workflow management technology in these virtual enterprises, support for cross-organizational processes is necessary. Transaction support, already considered an important issue in intra-organizational workflow management systems, must be extended to deal with the cross-organizational aspects as well. This paper presents a high-level transaction model and architecture for crossorganizational workflow processes. Characteristic of the model is the flexibility in rollback semantics by combining rollback modes and rollback scopes, supported by a dynamically generated architecture that is configured conforming to an electronic contract that has been established between the different organizations. The transaction model and architecture are independent of the underlying workflow management system platform, however, in the CrossFlow project the presented technology is being implemented on top of IBM’s MQ Series Workflow.