Modeling Electronic Workflow Markets

摘要

Market-based inter-organizational workflow management integrates workflow management and business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce; it is a novel approach to workflow management which regards workflows as goods traded on an electronic market. In this paper, we investigate modeling aspects of electronic workflow markets. The workflow marketplace is modeled as a federation of workflow systems. Providers export workflows to the federation, and clients import workflows offered by other parties. Providers model prices and execution time of workflows, and requestors model budgets and deadlines for imported workflows. This information is then exploited at runtime for trading workflows on the market. In particular, cost and time requirements are used to determine the optimal provider based on the current execution state of the requestor.