Restricted Relations between Organizations for Cross-Organizational Processes

Abstract

One prerequisite of cross-organizational business processes are well-defined models of the organizational structure of the involved companies. But in reality maintaining these organizational models is difficult. That is because of the constant change happening in companies. Actors can be sick. They can leave, join or move within the organization. This leads to a constant effort for keeping the organizational models valid to policies. This paper describes a novel approach for modeling organizations as multidimensional graphs. Policies are represented as relations of user-defined types and as predicates. They are taken into account when resolving actors. The predicates restrict relations and consequently actor assignments. This leads to organizational models that conform to policies in intra-and cross-organizational business processes.