Lehrgebiet Informationssysteme

FB Informatik

LG IS

AG DBIS

(C) AG DBIS

Sharing Product Data among Heterogeneous Workflow Environments

Markus Bon, Norbert Ritter, Theo Härder

University of Kaiserslautern
Dept. of Computer Science (AG DBIS)
P.O. Box 3049, 67653 Kaiserslautern, Germany
e-mail: haerder@informatik.uni-kl.de

Full paper (PDF version)

Abstract

Nowadays, we increasingly face the situation that possibly heterogeneous workflow environments must be integrated in order to support company-internal business processes as well as cooperation among different enterprises more effectively. Thus, interoperability of heterogeneous workflow management systems (WfMSs) is the major goal of one of our projects conducted with industrial cooperation partners. In this paper, we, on one hand, report on how our approach supports integration of heterogeneous WfMSs in general, and, on the other hand, detail the very important aspect of allowing workflow applications associated with different, possibly heterogeneous workflow environments to share product data. Traditionally, the management of product data is beyond the scope of a WfMS and is left to the individual workflow applications. However in a multi-WfMS environment, additional control facilities are needed enabling multiple and potentially different WfMSs to share data for cooperation purposes. We introduce different approaches for product data control in heterogenous WfMS environments. As an important result of our work, global dataflow dependencies between workflows in different environments may be properly modeled and automatically controlled by extending the local workflows by activities, which provide the transparent supply of data. Fortunately, in most cases only few adaptations of the local workflow types are necessary to achieve this goal.

in: Proc. Int. Conf. CAD 2002, Dresden, March 2002.