CA-PLAN, an inter-organizational workflow model

Workflow management systems (WfMS) are accepted worldwide due to their ability in modeling and controlling business processes. In the past, we defined an intra-organizational workflow specification model, Process Language Plan. Plan, with the associated tools, allows user to describe the graph specification for processes, artifacts and participants´ organization. PLAN has been successfully implemented in Agentflow and run with workflow (Agentflow) applications. Plan and most current WfMS adopt the centralized architecture in an organization, so that they can be applied in an organization only. The participants in different organizations cannot serve one another with workflows. In this paper, we present an interorganizational workflow model, Collaborative Agentflow Process Language. CA-PLAN, extended from PLAN, lets workflow systems inside an organization be specified as workflow services provided by the organization. Its interorganizational architecture lets a user specify work applications as in Plan. Besides, the related service techniques and supporting tools provided in Agentflow systems are presented.