Enacting interorganizational workflows using nets in nets

Abstract

The primary task of a work ow management system is to enact case-driven business processes by joining several perspectives, including the controlow perspective, the resource perspective, the data perspective, the task perspective, and the operation perspective. In this paper, we propose reference nets, a particular class of Petri where the tokens can be references to other Petri nets, as a technique for clearly specifying each of the perspectives and the relation between these perspectives. The \nets in nets paradigm o ered by reference also allows to model mobility of a business object like a work ow instance, a resource, a data element, a task, or an operation. Therefore, reference are particularly suitable for specifying and enacting interorganizational work ows. To hide aspects only relevant for a single organization, we use advanced inheritance concepts to facilitate the exchange of business objects across organizational boundaries. To show the applicability of the approach, we have implemented a simple work ow engine using Renew: a Java-based interpreter of reference nets.

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