A Protocol Ontology for Inter Organizational Workflow Coordination

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A Protocol Ontology forInter Organizational
Workflow Coordination
Eric Andonoff, Wassim Bouaziz, Chihab
Hanachi Toulouse, France, IRIT Laboratory
Toulouse 1 University ADBIS 2007, Varna, Bulgaria
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Organization

• Context ? Inter-Organizational Workflow (IOW)
• Problem ? Coordination in IOW
• Approach ? Protocol based approach
• Contributions
• Coordination Protocol Ontology
• how to describe IOW coordination protocols?
• how to dynamically select them?
• Protocol Management System
• Conclusion

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Context

• Inter-Organizational Workflow
• Workflow
• automation of a single business process running
  in a single organization
• Inter Organizational Workflow (IOW)
• several organizations put in common their
  business processes ? value added service
• constraints
• autonomous organizations
• distributed and heterogeneous business processes
• dynamic IOW
• organizations are not predefined but dynamically
  selected at run time
• ? a step forward to make automated IOW
  applications possible

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Problem

• Coordination in IOW
• Rules and manages the interactions between
  business processes involved in IOW
• Takes into account IOW constraints (autonomy,
  distribution, heterogeneity)
• Important problem in IOW which remains open
  notably with the emergence of dynamic IOW

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Problem

• Dynamic Coordination in IOW
• Issues
• Finding partners (organizations)
• Connect a requester organization looking for a
  workflow service
• (i.e. a service implementing a business process)
  to one or several
• organizations able to provide the requested
  service
• Negotiation between Partners
• Evaluate the provided workflow services (quality
  of service)
• Select the provider organization
• Specification of contracts between partners
• Execution of these contracts

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Approach

• Protocols are recurrent in dynamic IOW
  coordination issues
• Coordination Protocols first class entities
• Coordination Protocols are
• Isolated to be better studied, designed and
  exploited
• Specified, validated and implemented by
  separating
• protocols rules
• from the way they are used which is specific to
  each organization
• Shared and reused at run time by each
  organization involved in IOW

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Approach

• Coordination Protocols pushed out of IOW
  applications ? Protocol Management System
• Server of coordination protocol acting as an
  interaction medium between business processes
  (and consequently workflow systems)
• Permits the description, selection and enactment
  of coordination protocols
• Relieves business processes (and consequently
  workflow systems) of coordination protocol
  management

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Contributions

• Coordination Protocol Ontology
• Description of Coordination Protocols
• Mains concepts
• Classification of IOW Coordination Protocols
• How to use this ontology to describe a protocol
• Dynamic Selection of Coordination Protocols
• Using the IOW Coordination Protocol
  Classification
• According to the coordination issue to be solved
  and the type of interaction the participating
  organizations are able to perform
• Architecture of a Protocol Management System

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Coordination Protocol Ontology

• Description of Coordination Protocols
• Main concepts (implemented using Protégé-2000
  OWL)

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Coordination Protocol Ontology

• Description of Coordination Protocols
• Classification of IOW Coordination Protocols
• Identification of IOW Coordination Protocols
• Finding Partners Matchmaker and Broker
  coordination protocols of MAS and Web services
• Negotiation between Partners
• Criteria Negotiation behavior, Number of
  partners, Number of rounds and Multi-Attribute
  negotiation
• Multi-Attribute auctions, Argumentation,
  Heuristic and Iterative Contract-Net Protocols of
  MAS

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Coordination Protocol Ontology

• Description of Coordination Protocols
• Classification of IOW Coordination Protocols
• Hierarchy of IOW Coordination Protocols
  (implemented using Protégé-2000 OWL)

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Coordination Protocol Ontology

• Description of Coordination Protocols
• Using IOW Coordination Protocol Ontology to
  design Coordination protocols

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Coordination Protocol Ontology

• Dynamic Selection of Coordination Protocols
• according to
• the considered IOW coordination issue
• the type of interaction the organizations
  involved in the IOW are able to participate in

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Coordination Protocol Ontology

• Dynamic Selection of Coordination Protocols
• Examples
• Protocol to support finding partner with a
  peer-to-peer execution
• Q1 (retrieve (?x) (and (Objective
  ?FindingPartners?)
• ( P2Pexecution True) ) )
• R1 (?x Matchmaker)
• Protocol to support finding partner and able to
  compare workflow services in the Travel business
  domain and able to consider several providers
• Q2 (retrieve (?x) (and (?y ( Name ?Travel?))
  
• (?z ?y has-business-domain)
• (?x ?z used-in)
• (?x ?t implementsfp)
• (?t NumberOfProviders gt 1)
• (?x FindingPartner)))
• R2 Matchmakers or/and Brokers satisfying the
  conditions

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Coordination Protocol Ontology

• Axioms
• Constraint the concepts of the ontology (classes,
  properties and relationships)
• Expressed in Protégé Axiom Language (PAL)
• Examples
• Each protocol type has a minimal number of
  participants greater than 2
• (forall ?ProtocolType (gt (allowed-slot-value
  MinNumbParticipant ?ProtocolType) 2))
• Each conversation has an actor who plays the role
  of moderator and implements the ProtocolType used
  in the conversation
• (defrange ?pt FRAME Conversation used-in)
  pt conversation
• (forall ?Conversation ( gt (exist ?Actor
  (and ((participates ?Actor ?Conversation)
• (plays ?Actor ?Role)
  (allowed-slot-value TypeRole Role 'Moderator' )
  )))
• (and ((instance-of (?Actor)
  Moderator) (implements ?Actor ?pt) ))))

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Protocol Management System

• Architecture

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Conclusion

• A Novel Approach to IOW Coordination
• Isolate Coordination Protocols involved in IOW
  from participating business processes
• which are left to a Protocol Management System
• Contributions
• Description of IOW Coordination Protocols using
  our Coordination Protocol Ontology
• Dynamic Selection of IOW Coordination Protocols
• Using an IOW Coordination Protocol Hierarchy
• According to the coordination issues to be solved
  and the type of interaction the participating
  organizations are able to perform
• Architecture of a Protocol Management System

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Conclusion

• Future works
• Provide an implementation of the PMS
• Use the PMS in other contexts than the IOW one
• E-government
• Crisis Management

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Appendix