Inter-organizational business process modeling for electronic commerce based on pi-calculus

Abstract

Electronic commerce on the Internet has become exceedingly dynamic and inter-organizational in recent times. Interorganizational workflow management system has become an important paradigm for business-to-business electronic commerce applications. The modeling of interorganizational business processes is a challenging task, due to the high degree of autonomy and heterogeneity of the cooperative organizations. A number of standardization initiatives are working on standards for modeling languages that can be employed under interorganizational environments. This paper presents a formal specification methodology for interorganizational workflow modeling which is founded upon the pi-calculus process algebra. This method works well for characterizing the behaviors and interactions of the workflow processes that belong to different organizations in terms of the semantics of pi-calculus. Experimental results show that the proposed method works well for the modeling of electronic commerce systems under interorganizational environments.