Adaptive Outsourcing in Cross-Organizational Work ows

The work ow 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. Any attempt to distribute work ows among di erent organizations has to face the problems posed by the complex relationship among autonomous organizations and their services. To address these problems we propose a service-oriented model for cross-organizational work ows. Modeling the work ow execution as a cooperation of services allows di erent organizations to interact via well-de ned interfaces. We further show how the execution can be optimized by selecting services depending on their contribution to quality criteria of the work ow.