Cooperation and Interconnection of Enterprise Process Services

Abstract : As far as business process automation development is considered, depolyment of process interoperability and interconnection mechanisms becomes inevitable. Actually, these mechanisms are indispensable to co-ordinate business processes within and beyond organisation boundaries, to strength awareness inside virtual enterprises, to facilitate multinational e-transactions, etc. Therefore, thinking and proposing solutions to insure interoperability and interconnection between organisational business processes is becoming a hot topic of research. Actually, existing work co-ordination systems (workflows, shared agenda, co-operative authoring tools, revision and configuration control systems, ...) have been mainly developed to suit the intern needs of enterprises. Thus, most of these systems are not adapted to inter-enterprise co-operation. The aim of this paper is to provide a process interconnexion model, supporting dynamics of organisational process and of their interconnection, and the implementation of this model on our co-operative work environment. This latter is build on a CORBA bus deployed on an intranet/internet network. The paper introduces our process model, our process service model, our process service interconnection model and the whole model implementation on Discobole (DIStributed CO-operation and Business prOcess on LinE).