CROSSWORK - Cross-Organisational Workflow Formation and Enactment

Achieving sustainable growth and improving competitiveness in increasingly complex and dynamic market environments requires businesses to build agile partnerships and alliances. Market demands can only be satisfied within dynamic networks of collaborating organisations. True collaboration inside such networks requires tight but flexible integration of business processes. In CrossWork we focus on distributed, cross-organisational development processes in the automotive industry, forming Networks of Automotive Excellence (NoAE). The main project objective is the development of mechanisms for automated workflow formation and enactment, enabling NoAE. Our technological approach is based on Multiagent Systems (MAS), introducing the paradigm of distributed & decentralised decision making in Workflow Management Systems (WfMS). In contrast to state-of-the-art WfMS we avoid statically linked workflows, but let workflows form dynamically. The flexible mechanisms of CrossWork also handle exceptions during the enactment phase, resulting in dynamic workflow adaptations. To facilitate automated share and exchange of information across organisational boundaries we will develop a machine-readable representation of domain and workflow knowledge (an ontology). A novel enterprise modelling framework, supporting the automated formation of cross-organisational workflow models, will result in less effort for development, maintenance and adaptation of enterprise models, which is of specific interest for SMEs. Automatically generated user interfaces will allow users to acquire hands-on-experience which leads to improved local workflow models. Our business objectives are improved overall process quality (through enabling selection and integration of best-of-class network partners), reduced transaction costs and information flow-time (due to fast and effective integration of network partners), and improved flexib