Verification of Inter-Organizational Workflow Models in Supply Chain Management
Henry H. Bi, Arie Segev, J. Leon Zhao. 2003. Verification of Inter-Organizational Workflow Models in Supply Chain Management. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on e-Business (WeB 2003), Seattle, WA, USA, December 13-14, 2003. pp. 213-224.DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.1561292
12 Pages Posted: 1 Mar 2010 Last revised: 28 Apr 2019
Date Written: 2003
Abstract
Inter-organizational workflows play an important role in supply chain management. The deployment of correctly designed workflow models helps avoid higher costs of breakdown, debugging, and fixing during runtime. The issue of workflow verification is even more critical in supply chain management as its workflow is comprised of a global workflow and the private workflows of all organizations involved. Furthermore, the autonomous requirement makes it difficult to verify all parts of the supply chain workflow as a single step. That is, organizations in a supply chain usually have no information about the processes of other organizations, and each organization can change its processes so long as such changes do not violate the public processes. As a result, an inter-organizational workflow cannot be simply treated as a single workflow for the purpose of verification. In this paper, we extend our logic-based workflow verification approach to supply chain management. We propose a two-level technique in which we isolate private processes by splitting public activities, verify each private process, and then verify the global process. We demonstrate the validity of the two-level approach in the context of supply chain management.
Keywords: inter-organizational workflow verification, supply chain management, workflow verification
JEL Classification: M1
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation