Agentflow - A Cooperative Inter-organizational Workflow System

• Main Authors: Shung-Bin Yan, 殷玄彬
• Other Authors: Feng-Jian Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/04512248999145756036

博士 === 國立交通大學 === 資訊工程系所 === 93 === Workflow management systems (WfMSs) are accepted worldwide due to their ability of modeling and controlling business processes. In the past, we defined an intra-organizational workflow specification model, Process LANguage PLAN. PLAN, with the associated tools, allows user to describe the graph specification for processes, artifacts and participants’ organization. PLAN has been successfully implemented in Agentflow to support workflow (Agentflow) applications. PLAN and most current WfMSs are designed to adopt the centralized architecture such that they can be applied in an organization only. However, the participants of Agentflow applications in different organizations can hardly serve each other with workflows. In this dissertation, a service-oriented cooperative workflow model, Cooperative Agentflow Process LANguage (CA-PLAN) is presented. CA-PLAN proposes a workflow component model to model inter-organizational process. In CA-PLAN, an inter-organizational process is partitioned into several intra-organizational processes. Each workflow system inside an organization is modeled as an Integrated Workflow Component (IWC). Each IWC contains a process service interface specifying the process services provided by the organization, in conjunction with a remote process interface specifying what the remote processes are used to refer to remote process services provided by other organizations, and intra-organizational processes. IWC is a workflow node and participant. An inter-organizational process is made of connection among these process services and remote processes with respect to different IWCs. Besides, the related service techniques and supporting tools provided in Agentflow system (architecture and implementation) are also presented. Besides, we also present an intelligent and personalized enterprise process portal. The scenarios of workflow applications are no longer limited to small user groups operating the document management or data processing applications. Meanwhile, business process automation and integration are getting more sophisticated. The system deploys workflow applications inside the Enterprise Process Portal to help employee’s assistants in daily works as well as manager’s advisor in executive decision.