A Unified Framework for Modeling Cooperative Design Processes and Cooperative Business Processes

We look at any cooperative design process as a decision making process, i.e. a non deterministic process. The process is performed by responsible agents having the freedom to decide how to proceed according to their assessment of the situation they are faced to. However, the cooperative design process cannot be an ad-hoc and chaotic process. We look at it as a repeatable process made of steps resulting each of the application of the same pattern for decision making. The pattern views a decision as a choice of the way to proceed in a given situation to achieve an intention. An intention can be fulfilled in different ways depending on the situation being considered. We propose a process meta-model for describing such a pattern of decision making. This metamodel can also be used for modeling cooperative business processes whether well structured or ill-structured. In order to deal with a wide range of cooperative processes, we propose a single process meta-model which provides the structuredness of the predefined models and the flexibility of ill-structured processes.