Towards a Foundational Framework for Developing and Testing Inter-organizational Business Processes

Abstract

Modeling and analyzing inter-organizational business processes (IOPs) is complicated substantially by heterogeneous process-modeling languages (e.g., surface vs. analysis languages) as well as by their inherent properties of loose coupling and local control (views). On top, multiple concerns must be addressed when modeling and analyzing IOPs, such as process data, behavior, distribution, and resource management. Whereas significant advances have been accomplished by the research community to model and analyze IOPs within the boundaries of a subset of these concerns, a holistic approach that enables a unified view across the strongly intermingled IOP concerns is missing. We believe that more research effort is needed towards establishing such a holistic, unified view based on a common language-oriented foundation for modeling and analyzing IOPs. This paper lays out one direction of language engineering towards this goal, collects generic and specific requirements on a language framework for inter-organizational business processes, and discusses them tentatively.

Modeling and analyzing inter-organizational business processes (IOPs) is complicated substantially by heterogeneous process-modeling languages (e.g., surface vs. analysis languages) as well as by their inherent properties of loose coupling and local control (views). On top, multiple concerns must be addressed when modeling and analyzing IOPs, such as process data, behavior, distribution, and resource management. Whereas significant advances have been accomplished by the research community to model and analyze IOPs within the boundaries of a subset of these concerns, a holistic approach that enables a unified view across the strongly intermingled IOP concerns is missing. We believe that more research effort is needed towards establishing such a holistic, unified view based on a common language-oriented foundation for modeling and analyzing IOPs. This paper lays out one direction of language engineering towards this goal, collects generic and specific requirements on a language framework for inter-organizational business processes, and discusses them tentatively.