An approach to Inter-Organizational workflow management in an electronic institution

Abstract

In a virtual organization, different business partners (individual organizations) cooperate in order to achieve a common goal. The coordination of the corresponding inter-organizational workflow is an important issue. This chapter aims to describe the Electronic Institution platform and to focus on an approach to the inter-organizational workflow management agent, mainly discussing its behavior, interfaces and information exchanged. This approach is conceptualized as a service within an Electronic Institution framework providing several agent-based services related with the formation and operation of virtual organizations. The chapter presents behavior of the inter-organizational workflow management service, modeled as an extension to a contract monitoring service. The chapter also deals with the information exchange needs between these services and with the partners involved in a virtual organization contractual relationship. Copyright (c) 2006 IFAC