CROSSWORKS: Cross-Organisational Workflow Formation and Enactment
Project description
chieving 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 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 state-of of-the 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 informationacross organisational boundaries we will develop a machine machine-readable representation of domain and workflow knowledge (an ontology). A novel enterprise modelling framework, supporting the automated formation of cross 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 hands- on on-experience which leads to improved local workflow models. Our business objectives are improved overall process quality (through enabling selection and integration of best best- of of-class network partners), reduced transaction costs and information flow flow-time (due to fast and effective integration of network partners), and improved flexibility with an open platform architecture.
Why does it matter
Full project, focus on distributed, cross-organizational development processes in the automotive industry, forming Networks of Automotive Excellence (NoAE)
Partners and funding sources
Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria; UMIST, Manchester, UK; Technical University of Eidhoven, Holland; Exodus S.A., SchlumbergerSema Sociedad Anónima Española, Spain; MAGNA Intier Automotive Eybl Interiors GmbH, Germany; Profactor Research GmbH, Germany.
Funding Agency:
EU SIXTH FRAMEWORK, FP6 – Proposal/Contract FP6-2002-IST-1
Results
Methodology
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