Interaction protocols for cross-organisational workflows

Abstract

Workflow technologies are widely used in industry and commerce to assist in the specification, execution and completion of well defined processes within organisations. As industrial and commercial relations have evolved, based on advances on information and communications technologies, cross-organisational workflow integration has become an important issue. Since organisations can have very different workflows, the creation of compatible workflows so that organisations can collaborate and/or carry out mutual transactions automatically in an integrated fashion can be a very complex and time consuming process. As a consequence, the development of technologies to support the creation and execution of compatible workflows is a most relevant issue. In the present article we introduce the JamSession coordination platform as a tool to implement cross-organisational workflow integration. JamSession is declarative and based on algebraic specification methods, and therefore workflow integration implemented using this platform can profit from formal behavioural analysis, based on which desired features and properties can be verified and/or obtained.

LS2C – A Platform to Design, Implement and Execute Social Computations

“…In Figure 2 we depict agents as black dots. In that figure, company A accepts to have seven simultaneous open orders at 2 This example is borrowed and adapted from (Correa da Silva et al, 2012). Evidently, we are exhibiting only a very small fraction of a model for S 3 using this example.…”

“…The JamSession platform is a language developed for purposes similar to those of LSC. It was initially conceived as an executable specification language to manage the interactions between human controlled and synthetic characters in Second Life-style virtual worlds and multiplayer computer games, and later employed to mediate business interactions between organisations in cross-organisational workflows (Correa da Silva, 2011;Correa da Silva et al, 2012). A simplified prototype of JamSession has been implemented in Prolog, and a cloud-based prototype of JamSession has been implemented using the functional language F , based on which sample demos of applications have been developed (David, 2012).…”

“…Similarly to LCC and to what can be observed in business process modeling (Correa da Silva et al, 2012;Robertson, 2004), social interaction protocols can be considered at specification time and at run time. Specification time refers to the design of social computers, while run time can refer to the a posteriori analysis of the actual execution of social computations, in which e.g.…”