Cross-organizational workflow integration using contracts

Enterprises are lining up into virtual enterprises to meet the ever-increasing customer’s demands in a more flexible and effective way than before. Hence, the business processes as well as supporting workflow systems need to be tightly embedded into streamlined, virtual value chains that can transcend organizational boundaries. It is generally recognized that the combination of workflow with business-object component technology provides the required solution. However, today’s widespread business workflow modeling techniques suffer from an object bias, ignoring the most essential coordination vehicle in the enterprise: communication, and the resulting commitments. In this paper, we present contracts that encapsulate (formal) commitments laid down as a set of obligations to coordinate and control the interaction between business workflows. We use the business contract specification language XLBC to formally link the Component Definition Language (CDL) specification of business object-based workflow systems. XLBC is an extension of the Formal Language for Business Communication (FLBC) and a framework for the semantics of XLBC transactions is described. Finally, we indicate a feasible implementation architecture on the basis of an emerging internet-enabled business process architecture, ebXML and Trading Partner Agreements (TPAs). D 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.