An Architecture for Collaborative Scenarios Applying a Common BPMN-Repository

Abstract

Abstract.Collaborative business scenarios require a flexible integration of enterprises. To manage inter-organizational business processes, existing concepts for business process management (BPM) need to be adopted and extended. This paper presents a conceptual architecture for cross-enterprise processes' planning, implementation, and controlling. Core component of the architecture is a distributed repository managing all required data and information, which especially obtains a process-oriented view on collaboration networks. Crossorganizational processes need close coordination among networking partners. This is achieved through the integration of business process models. Thus we further propose a procedure model of an XML-based model transformation, which reduces complexity of the modeling-task and enables model integration on a conceptual level.

A Framework for Business Process Model Repositories

“…For example, OSIRIS (Open Service Infrastructure for Reliable and Integrated process Support) [16], combining the ideas of web services and hyperdatabases, to support peer-to-peer process execution by invoking services from distributed repositories. The BPMN repository architecture [17] provides a virtual service platform, which makes it easy to support collaborative scenarios between different organizations.…”

“…-The monitoring aspect (M) contains concepts to define how the performance of a process should be monitored, e.g., [3,5]. -The management control (MC) aspect contains concepts to define the management controls that are implemented by (parts of) processes, e.g., [17].…”

“…-Process administration and monitoring tools, which can be use to manage or monitor the (executions of) processes, e.g., BP-Mon [3] provides them. -Collaboration tools, which can be used to establish business collaborations based on processes in the repository, e.g., the BPMN repository architecture [17] provides them.…”

“…For example, query tools have been proposed as external tools [2], but at the same time tools for establishing collaborations between organizations, based on their processes, have been proposed as internal parts of the repository [17]. We made the separation between internal and external functionality above, based on what we most frequently observed in the analyzed BP Model Repositories.…”

“…In most cases the storage layer is implemented by a general database management system. Relational (e.g., [12,8,3,5]), objectoriented (e.g., [17,18]) and XML databases (e.g., [8,3,5,17,18]) have all been observed in the concrete BP Model Repositories that were studied. Alternative implementations that have been observed are implementations using general repositories, of which one using a distributed repository, and an implementation in which the data is stored as files in a filesystem.…”