Modeling of Inter-Organizational Workflow and Agent-Based Implementation

The significant advancement of information technology has enabled an enterprise to become more competitive by satisfying customers` unpredictable and changing needs through dynamic collaboration and cooperation of complementary members of a virtual organization. The research proposes an inter-organizational workflow modeling method and agent based implementation for a virtual organization. The method facilitates the dynamic inter-organizational integration and collaboration of distributed information systems. Software agents are mobile, executable, and responsible for computing and data exchange across distributed database servers following the directions by the virtual organization workflow management server, where business processes are systematically modeled using the proposed workflow modeling method. To illustrate, a developed prototype system is introduced and examples are given to demonstrate its operability and capability.