Dynamic Plugging of Business Processes in Cross Organizational Workflow

This paper shows how it is possible to use agents and ontologies to deal with dynamic coordination of business processes in Cross-Organizational Workflow (COW). The aim of COW is to support the cooperation between distributed and heterogeneous business processes running in different autonomous organizations to reach a common goal, corresponding to a value-added service. In this paper, we consider a particular case of COW called dynamic COW in which the different partners (organizations) involved in the COW are not necessarily known before its execution either because they are unknown at design-time or no more available at run-time. Consequently, coordination in dynamic COW raises two specific problems, which are: (i) partners finding able to realize an COW service (i.e. a service implementing a business process involved in an COW), and (ii) negotiation of COW services between partners. This paper first defines an agent-based architecture to support COW service execution. Then, it presents two specific agent-based mediation infrastructures introduced to deal with partners finding and negotiation between them and shows, for each of these infrastructures, how they use ontologies for automatically discovering COW services and choosing protocols to negotiate COW services.