1st International Workshop on Coordination of Inter-Organizational Workflows: Agent and Semantic Web based Models
Workflow systems are widely adopted by organizations for supporting business processes. In particular, workflow systems help organizations to coordinate the different actors involved in the business process by automating repetitive tasks and facilitating the distribution of documents, information and control. Today's workflow systems, however, do not adequately support processes that cross the boundaries of multiple organizations. The enhancement of workflow systems in this direction, Inter-Organizational Workflows (IOW), is essential given the growing need for organizations to cooperate and coordinate their activities in order to meet the new demands of highly dynamic and open markets. The different organizations involved in such cooperation must correlate their respective resources and skills, and coordinate their respective business processes towards a common goal, corresponding to a value-added service.
Coordination in IOW raises several problems such as the definition of the universe of discourse -without which it would not be possible to solve the various semantic conflicts that are bound to occur between several autonomous and heterogeneous workflows-, the finding of partners, the negotiation of the processes themselves between partners according to certain criteria (due time, precision, visibility of the process evolution, way of doing it…), and the synchronization of the distributed and concurrent execution of these different processes. Moreover, organizations are shifting from the typical static case of the "virtual enterprises" to a dynamic case where dynamic relations and alliances are established. Workflow and process-support tools have been widely studied for this static case investigating issues concerning inter-operability, process control, awareness and reliability, etc. The dynamic case has been less widely examined, and tools developed in the static case cannot be straightforwardly adapted. Therefore new issues must be considered: tools and generic models for negotiation and contracts enactment and monitoring, processes mechanisms for workflow service discovery and matching, ...
Agent technology provides natural abstractions to deal with autonomy, distribution, and coordination which are inherent to IOW. Moreover, when IOW is deployed in the context of virtual enterprises, agent technology can help by providing high level organizational concepts to adequately describe the macro-level dimension of such an alliance. Indeed, adopting a multi-agent organizational view enables to inherit powerful and experimented abstractions and representation concepts, like roles, groups, teams, interactions protocols, responsibilities, authorities, permissions. These aspects constitute a conceptual tool that would probably ease an adequate capture and modelling of IOW organization.
The Semantic Web is also a useful and complementary enabling technology. It first helps to represent a shared business view through a common terminology or ontology. It also provides means to describe, discover and select relevant workflow services offered by business partners.
Furthermore, the combination of these two technologies would renew the way to consider IOW and open enormous opportunities for building advanced infrastructures to support IOW coordination. Agents would help to mediate between heterogeneous and autonomous business processes to obtain consensus representations. Workflow services could also be agentified and then would be able to negotiate with peers the qualities of services, their compositions, and more generally the conditions of their cooperation towards a specific goal. On the other hand, interaction protocols of such agents would be recorded in an ontology and selected intelligently at run time according to the situation.
This workshop will try to address the following issue: how agent and/or semantic web technologies can help in designing and implementing adequate coordination models for Inter-Organizational Workflow. It is meant to cover foundations, techniques, methodologies and applications of Inter-Organizational Workflow coordination by means of Agent and/or Semantic Web technologies. The workshop is interdisciplinary in nature and open to contributions from fields as varied as Multi-Agent Systems, Workflow, Cooperative Information Systems and Semantic Web.
ArgMAS 2006 @ AAMAS 2006 • 
Linkable Coordination Artifacts for Inter-Organisational Workflow (articolo in atti, 2006) — Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci, Nicola Zaghini
Linkable Coordination Artifacts for Inter-Organisational Workflow (CIOW 2006 @ AAMAS 2006, 08/05/2006) — Alessandro Ricci (Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci, Nicola Zaghini)