CrossFlow Project Overview

Introduction

Nowadays, many organizations form dynamic part-nerships to effectively deal with market requirements. Companies focus on their core business and outsource secondary activities to other organizations. Growing complexity of products requires co-makership relations between organizations. Value chains require a tight cooperation between companies. As a result, the creation of virtual organizations has become a major issue. To enable their operation, the information processing infrastructures of the participating organizations need to be linked. The workflow management systems that control the processes in the organizations are a key element here. Linked workflow systems should allow one organization (the service consumer) to start a process (a service) on its behalf in another organization (the service provider) and receive the results of this process. As black-box processes are too coarse for tightly cooperating organizations, advanced monitoring and control mechanisms are required as well.

Seven European institutes form the consortium of the CrossFlow ESPRIT project. This project aims at developing information technology for advanced process support in dynamic virtual organizations with contract-based service trading. As such, CrossFlow can be considered a project investigating the intersection of workflow management and electronic commerce technology.

CrossFlow Approach

CrossFlow aims at providing high-level support for workflows in dynamically formed virtual organizations. High-level support is obtained by abstracting services and offering advanced cooperation support. Virtual organizations are dynamically formed by contract-based matchmaking between service providers and consumers. CrossFlow developments are driven by requirements from real-world scenarios.

Service abstraction

In virtual organizations, a partner does not require full operational details of other partners. Rather, a well-defined abstraction of their operation should be used to obtain an effective view on both data and processes. As partners in a virtual organization often have different IT platforms, a heterogeneous environment exists. This heterogeneity should be ad-dressed by abstraction of technical details of partners. For both reasons, CrossFlow defines the interaction between organizations not in terms of their workflow systems, but on an abstraction level above these systems.

Cooperation support

CrossFlow addresses three areas of advanced co-operation support functionality to complement basic workflow interoperability. Quality of Service monitoring allows tracking the progress of outsourced services, both online during service execution and offline to provide aggregate information. Level of Control enactment provides means for high-level cross-organizational transaction management and consumer-controlled process control over outsourced services. Flexible Change Control allows for dynamic changes to execution paths of services during their execution.

Contracts

The basis for cooperation in virtual organizations is the contract, in which the encapsulated service and cooperation support services can be completely specified. Partially defined contracts are used by service providers to advertise their services and by service consumers to search for services. As such, the contract is the basis for dynamic partnerships.

CrossFlow Architecture

The CrossFlow architecture supports both contract making and contract (service) enactment. The architecture is based on commercial workflow management system technology, shielded from the CrossFlow technology by an interface layer. In the project, IBM’s MQSeries Workflow (formerly FlowMark) workflow product is used.

Contract making

When a service provider wants to advertise a service it can perform on another organization’s behalf, it uses its contract manager to send a contract tem-plate to a trader. When a service consumer wants to outsource the enactment of a service, it uses a contract template to search for service providers via a trader. When a match between consumer’s requirements and provider’s offer is found, an electronic contract can be made by filling in the template.

Contract enactment

Based on specifications in the contract, a dynamic contract and service enactment architecture is set up. The symmetrical architecture contains proxy gateways that control all communication and support services for advanced cooperation functionality. After contract completion, the dynamically created modules can be disposed of.

CrossFlow Demonstrators

In the CrossFlow project, two real-world application scenarios are used to demonstrate the approach: a logistics scenario and an insurance scenario.

Logistics Scenario

KPN Research investigates for TNT Post Group how TNT can take advantage of CrossFlow technology to drive the competitive edge. Information-intensive and highly standardized basic logistic processes make TNT a good candidate for the introduction of workflow management systems to improve effi-ciency and cost-effectiveness. A major challenge is to increase the variety of the service portfolio without increase of costs. Also, integration with the systems of customers is an important challenge, e.g. a direct connection to their enterprise resource planning systems. Integration with workflow-enabled versions of these systems requires support for flexible, interoperable workflow management within TNT.
In the CrossFlow scenario, TNT acts as a service provider for KPN Telecom in the distribution of mobile telephones. This requires a high-level coupling of TNT’s and KPN’s workflow support, offering powerful monitoring and control functionality.

Insurance Scenario

AGF Irish Life (AGFIL) investigates the application of CrossFlow technology for cooperation with its service providers. While AGFIL concentrates on their insurance handling core business, it outsources a number of tasks, thus creating a virtual organization. Cross-organizational workflow support is required for flexible and integrated process manage-ment over all partners in the virtual organization, to ensure superior customer service and satisfaction.
The CrossFlow scenario is based on AGFIL’s personal lines motor damage claim activities. Outsour-ced services in this context cover call center handling, damage loss assessment, and damage repairs. In the CrossFlow scope, the emphasis is on the support for outsourcing loss assessment tasks. Consequently, a cross-organizational workflow context has to be realized integrating processes at AGFIL and at a loss assessment consultancy firm.

CrossFlow Fact Sheet

CrossFlow is a project in the 4th ESPRIT framework. It started in September 1998 and is planned to be completed in September 2000. Total planned effort is almost 30 person years.

Project Partners

Project Contact

Jacques Saint-Blancat
CER IBM France - S3228/BP43
06610 La Gaude
France
jsb@fr.ibm.com

Project Web Site

Further information and the list of public deliverables can be found at the following address:
http://www.crossflow.org/

Standards

The project aims to adhere to standards where pos-sible. Where appropriate, the project results will be submitted to standardization organizations like the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) and Object Management Group (OMG).