CORVETTE: a cooperative workflow for virtual teams coordination

Workflow management systems are now widely deployed for handling administrative and production applications. In order that the workflow management systems keep supporting a larger range of applications, several research works have been launched to improve the workflow technology. This paper reports on the CORVETTE [1] project, an experiment in developing a cooperative workflow management system by integrating a workflow management system commercialised by Hitachi Ltd. with a cooperation technology proposed by INRIA. A cooperative workflow management system is a system gathering workflow management functionalities and having capabilities to manage cooperative behaviours characteristics of creative application processes (e.g. in codesign and coengineering). In this kind of applications, interactions between activities are characterised by being more subtle than in traditional applications (i.e. non-scheduled, unpredictable, dynamic, etc.). More precisely, CORVETTE was targeted to support coordination workflow processes of a virtual team working over the internet.