Business Process Integration: How to Achieve Interoperability through Process Patterns

Abstract

Business process integration (BPI) is a crucial technique for supporting inter-organizational business interoperability. BPI allows automation of business processes and the integration of systems across numerous organizations. The integration of organizations' process models is one of the most addressed and used approach to achieve BPI. However, this model integration is complex and requires that designers have extensive experience in particular when organizations' business processes are incompatible. This paper considers the issue of modeling cross-organization processes out of a collection of organizations' private process models. To this end, we propose six adaptation patterns to resolve incompatibilities when combining organizations' processes. Each pattern is formalized with workflow net.