Applying coloured activity net to model interorganizational workflow

Abstract

With the growing complexity of transactions in internet-based environment, it is crucial for managing process interaction between agents. To aid the allocation process is still of great interest to the designers of interorganizational workflow. This paper proposed a method coloured activity net (CAN) which integrates the process, case, and resource viewpoints based on coloured Petri net and agent-based concepts. First, we introduce a workflow specification module to express the message transferring, state changing, process execution, and resource sharing. We then apply CAN to model an interorganizational workflow that involves message transferring forward and backward between partners. After being validated by simulation of CPN Tools, the soundness of CAN model can be verified by state space analysis under the support of CPN Tools, e.g. the reachability graph, liveness property, home marking, dead marking, and fairness property. The results demonstrate that the CAN is feasible to model interorganizational workflow.