Dynamic modification of inter-organizational workflows due to addition of business rules, 2003

Item — Call Number: MU Thesis Li

Identifier: b2089176

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

From the Collection:

The collection consists of theses written by students enrolled in the Monmouth University graduate Software Engineering program. The holdings are bound print documents that were submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for the Master of Science degree.

Dates

Creation: 2003

Creator

Li, Joanna (1969- ) (Author, Person)
Rosca, Daniela (Thesis advisor, Person)

Conditions Governing Access

The collection is open for research use. Access is by appointment only.

Access to the collection is confined to the Monmouth University Library and is subject to patron policies approved by the Monmouth University Library.

Collection holdings may not be borrowed through interlibrary loan.

Research appointments are scheduled by the Monmouth University Library Archives Collections Manager (723-923-4526). A minimum of three days advance notice is required to arrange a research appointment for access to the collection.

Patrons must complete a Researcher Registration Form and provide appropriate identification to gain access to the collection holdings. Copies of these documents will be kept on file at the Monmouth University Library.

Extent

1 Items (print book) : 59 pages ; 8.5 x 11.0 inches (28 cm).

Language of Materials

English

Additional Description

Abstract

Inter-organizational workflows represent one possible technology that supports the implementation of the business-to-business integration concept. The concept has been emphasized by the continuously growing e-commerce applications.

One important aspect of e-commerce is the ability to rapidly react to changes imposed by trading partners, or market environments. Therefore, we need to represent workflows that allow for a quick implementation of change. In this thesis we focus on the dynamic modifications of inter-organizational workflows, due to the addition of business rules. Business rules represent the most dynamic component of a workflow; they express statements and constraints about the way an enterprise is doing business.

In the modification of the workflow we use the Public-to-Private approach, which guarantees the consistency between the public/inter-organizational workflow, and the private/indiviual organizations workflows, when the public workflow is partitioned into the private workflows. If the modification is done based on three abstract types of business rules, the initial behavior of the private workflow is maintained.

In this thesis we present the markup language, rXRL, which is an extension of XRL, and incorporates the representation of these abstract business rules, allowing for a fast change of the workflow. The XML implementation is accompanied by the corresponding semantics of the rules represented in Petri-nets form, for allowing these rules to be processed by a Petri-net-based workflow engine. We demonstrate the expressive power of rXRL by implementing a small e-commerce application that involves the cooperation of mulitple trading partners.

Partial Contents

Abstract -- 1. Motivation -- 2. Background and related work -- 3. rXRL design principles -- 4. rXRL implementation -- 5. Examples of workflow modification by adding business rules -- 6. Discussion of contributions and future work -- Reference -- Appendix A. Introduction to Petri-Nets -- Appendix B. Introduce mapping XRL onto Petri-net -- Appendix C. rXRL DTD.