Deadlock-free Solution in Collaborative Workflow Environment

Abstract

Inter-organizational workflow collaboration plays an increasingly vital role in today’s business environment. Traditional deadlock verification technique does not work well in collaborative workflow environment. In this paper, we present a novel technique of Collaboration Guideline which allows partners to check whether there is deadlock in collaboration with the hosting workflow. We choose Pi calculus as the modelling language of collaborative workflows, because of its distributive and algebraic nature. We explain how deadlock can be detected with only observable behavior and additional constraints. Based on the insight of deadlock in collaborative workflows, the proposal of Collaboration Guideline is natural. The advantage of Collaboration Guideline is that it only exposes external behavior and limited information. Thus, Collaboration Guideline can be produced at the hosting company and used to verify deadlock at the partner’s site.