COO-flow: a Process Technology to Support Cooperative Processes

In this paper we present a process management technology for the coordination of creative and large scale distributed processes. Our approach is the result of usage analysis in domains like Software Development, Architecture/Engineering/Construction, and eLearning processes. The basic conclusions of these experiments are the following: (1) cooperative processes are described in the same way as production processes, but these descriptions are interpreted in a different way depending on the nature of the process, (2) the interpretation of process description depends mainly on the required flexibility of control flow and of data flow, and on the relationship between them, (3) the management of intermediate results is a central feature for supporting the cooperation inherent to these processes. COO-flow is a process technology that results from these studies. It is based on two complementing contributions: anticipation that allows succeeding activities to cooperate, and COO-transactions that allows parallel activities to cooperate. This paper introduces COO-flow characteristics, gives a (partial) formalization and briefly discusses its Web implementation.