Systematic Interaction Management in a Workflow View Based Business-to-Business Process Engine

Abstract

Workflow technology has recently been employed as a framework for implementing business-to-business (B2B) process enactment over the Internet. This typically requires collaborative enactment of workflows across multiple organizations. In this paper, we propose the use of workflow views as a fundamental support mechanism for B2B interactions. A workflow view is an external accessible subset of a private workflow. We present a methodology to show how B2B interactions can be systematically managed with the workflow view mechanism, by customizable orchestration of Web services mapping into internal existing workflows. We further present a deployment architecture for a B2B process engine and detail our implementation with contemporary Web services technologies. In addition, asynchronous events and exceptions as well as interaction monitoring can be facilitated in a unified framework.