Program :
Keynote Speech:
9:00-9:40
Emergent Semantics and Self-Organization in Organizational Workflows.
Aris M. Ouksel, The University of Illinois at Chicago
9:40-10:30:
Commitment Facets and Organizational Visibility for
Interorganizational Processes
Nirmit Desai and Munindar P. Singh
Linkable Coordination Artifacts for Inter-Organizational
Workflow
Andrea Omicini, Alessandro Ricci, and Nicola Zaghini
10:30-11:00 : Coffee Break
11:00-12:30
Compatibility Analysis of Local Modeling Views in
Interorganizational Workflow
Donghui Lin, Yasumasa Mita and Toru Ishida
Managing Inter-Organizational WorkflowsWith TEAM
Luiz Antônio M. Pereira, Rubens Nascimento Melo
Agent Based Web Service Composition In The Context Of A Supply-Chain
Based Workflow
Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, Maryam Purvis, Martin Purvis
Towards a Protocol Management System for Inter-Organization Workflow
Coordination
Eric Andonoff, Chihab Hanachi
Motivation &
Theme
Workflow systems are widely adopted
by organizations for supporting business processes. In particular,
workflow systems help organizations to coordinate the different
actors involved in the business process by automating repetitive
tasks and facilitating the distribution of documents, information and
control. Today's workflow systems, however, do not adequately support
processes that cross the boundaries of multiple organizations. The
enhancement of workflow systems in this direction, Inter-Organizational
Workflows (IOW), is essential given the growing need for organizations
to cooperate and coordinate their activities in order to meet the new
demands of highly dynamic and open markets. The different organizations
involved in such cooperation must correlate their respective resources
and skills, and coordinate their respective business processes towards
a common goal, corresponding to a value-added service.
Coordination in IOW raises several problems
such as the definition of the universe of discourse -without
which it would not be possible to solve the various semantic conflicts
that are bound to occur between several autonomous and heterogeneous
workflows-, the finding of partners, the negotiation of the processes
themselves between partners according to certain criteria (due time,
precision, visibility of the process evolution, way of doing it…),
and the synchronization of the distributed and concurrent execution
of these different processes. Moreover, organizations are shifting
from the typical static case of the "virtual enterprises" to a dynamic
case where dynamic relations and alliances are established. Workflow and
process-support tools have been widely studied for this static case investigating
issues concerning inter-operability, process control, awareness and reliability,
etc. The dynamic case has been less widely examined, and tools developed
in the static case cannot be straightforwardly adapted. Therefore new
issues must be considered: tools and generic models for negotiation
and contracts enactment and monitoring, processes mechanisms for workflow
service discovery and matching, ...
Agent technology provides natural abstractions
to deal with autonomy, distribution, and coordination which
are inherent to IOW. Moreover, when IOW is deployed in the context
of virtual enterprises, agent technology can help by providing
high level organizational concepts to adequately describe the macro-level
dimension of such an alliance. Indeed, adopting a multi-agent
organizational view enables to inherit powerful and experimented
abstractions and representation concepts, like roles, groups, teams,
interactions protocols, responsibilities, authorities, permissions.
These aspects constitute a conceptual tool that would probably ease
an adequate capture and modelling of IOW organization.
The Semantic Web is also a useful and complementary
enabling technology. It first helps to represent a shared business
view through a common terminology or ontology. It also provides
means to describe, discover and select relevant workflow services
offered by business partners.
Furthermore, the combination of these two technologies
would renew the way to consider IOW and open enormous opportunities
for building advanced infrastructures to support IOW coordination.
Agents would help to mediate between heterogeneous and autonomous
business processes to obtain consensus representations. Workflow
services could also be agentified and then would be able to negotiate
with peers the qualities of services, their compositions, and more
generally the conditions of their cooperation towards a specific
goal. On the other hand, interaction protocols of such agents would
be recorded in an ontology and selected intelligently at run time
according to the situation.
Main Objective
This workshop will try to address the
following issue: how agent and/or semantic web technologies
can help in designing and implementing adequate coordination
models for Inter-Organizational Workflow. It is meant to cover
foundations, techniques, methodologies and applications of Inter-Organizational
Workflow coordination by means of Agent and/or Semantic Web technologies.
The workshop is interdisciplinary in nature and open to contributions
from fields as varied as Multi-Agent Systems, Workflow, Cooperative
Information Systems and Semantic Web.
Topics
Possible topics include, but are not
limited to:
- business
process sharing, ontology;
- coordination
mechanisms for IOW;
- organization-oriented
coordination of IOW;
- interaction
protocols between workflows;
- workflow
interaction mining;
- contracts
enactment and monitoring;
- distributed
agent-based workflow enactment;
- semantic
workflow composition;
- transactions
over heterogeneous distributed workflows;
- techniques
for workflow web services;
- workflow
services’ description, discovery and invocation;
- workflow
capacity description language;
- workflow
service agentification;
- IOW architecture;
- IOW representation
with OWL-S and WSMO;
- Industrial
applications.
Paper Submission
We solicit original papers not exceeding
8 pages in length (according to the IEEE format of the AAMAS
conference, http://www.aamas2005.nl/paper_submissions-old.php
). Submissions will be assessed on their scientific content,
significance, originality, quality and clarity. Each paper
will be reviewed by at least 2 anonymous reviewers.
Submissions should be sent in PDF (or PS) format
via email to Chihab Hanachi: hanachi@univ-tlse1.fr
At least one author of each accepted papers
must register for the workshop.
Important Dates
Deadline for Paper Submission: February
1, 2006 (extended).
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: February
19, 2006
Deadline for Camera-Ready Paper: March 15,
2006
Workshop date: May, 8, 2006.
Program Chair
Chihab Hanachi, IRIT and University Toulouse 1, France
Program Committee
Khalid Benali, University of Nancy,
France,
Boualem Benattalah, University of New South
Wales, Australia
Brian Blake, Georgetown University, Washington
DC, USA.
Olivier Boissier, Ecole Nationale Supérieure
des Mines of Saint-Etienne, France
Francisco Curbera, IBM, USA
Dickson K. W. Chiu, Dickson Computer Systems,
Hong Kong, China
Monica Divitini, Norwegian University of Science
and Technology, Norway.
Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina,
USA
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts,
USA
Aris Ouksel, University of Illinois at Chicago,
USA.
Ricardo Rabelo, Federal University of Santa
Catarina, Brasil
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna in Cesena.,
Italy
Munindar Singh, North Carolina State University,
USA
Nahid Shahmehri, Linkoping University, Sweden
Christophe Sibertin-Blanc, IRIT University Toulouse
1
Katia Sycara, CMU, USA
José Vidal, University of South Carolina,
Columbia, USA