Deriving Service Models in Cross-Organizational Workflows

Competitive markets force companies to form virtual enterprises by outsourcing activities to external service providers. The workflow concept has been very successful in streamlining business processes by automating the coordination of activities, but has so far been limited to the use within single organizations. To address the problems of cross-organizational workflows we use a service-oriented workflow model. Within this approach, we present a technique how to derive a model of the external services, based on continuous-time Markov chains, by analyzing their externally observable behavior. This allows to assess the quality of external services, without compromising the autonomy of the service providers.