Interorganizational Workflows An approach based on Message Sequence Charts and Petri Nets

To date, workflow management focuses on improving the effectivity and efficiency of business processes within one organization. However, today’s corporations are challenged to cross organizational boundaries. Phenomena such as electronic commerce, extended enterprises and the Internet stimulate the cooperation between organizations. Therefore, it is interesting to consider workflows distributed over a number of organizations. Interorganizational workflow offers companies the opportunity to re-shape business processes beyond the boundaries of individual organizations. In this paper, we use message sequence charts to specify the interaction between organizations. Petri nets are used to model the workflows inside each organization. Two challenging problems related to interorganizational workflow are tackled in this paper: (1) What are the minimal requirements any interorganizational workflow should satisfy?, and (2) How to decide whether an interorganizational workflow (modeled in terms of Petri nets) is consistent with the interaction structure specified in terms of a message sequence chart?