Cooperation Policies for Inter-organizational Workflows

Abstract

In the context of inter-organizational workflows, interactions between partners should be constructive, complementary, and guide the work toward the objective of organizations involved in the workflow. Within our approach, inter-organizational workflow cooperation, which consists of workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection and workflow cooperation, this paper focuses on these cooperation policies one has to define in order to enforce and control interactions between partners’ workflows. The cooperation policies integrate the partners’ roles as well as their coordination, the dataflows allowed to pass from one partner’s workflow to another, and their intervisibility levels. The level of the visibility is used to preserve the partner privacy and know-how and is reduced as tiny as cooperation needs.