Contract Driven Cross-Organizational Business Processes

Managing the processes of autonomous business organizations while they collaborate is a key requirement in order to guarantee that every business partner sees benefits of the collaboration. Thanks to the advances in the middleware IT technologies, some of the most important limitations of cross-organizational collaborations have been resolved. Yet, there are still a number of problems related to the distributed and heteregenous nature of the cross-organizational business environment. The monitoring and coordination, or briefly the management, of cross-organizational processes is one of the important missing aspect of the domain. In this paper, we describe a contract driven cross-organizational process monitoring and coordination mechanism. The contract based solution goes one step further comparing to inflexible and isolationistc approaches of workflows. For modeling the cross-organizational collaboration, we propose a generic contract model and next, we introduce an event-driven infrastructure for the enactment and monitoring of contract related processes.