Specification of cooperative constraints in virtual enterprise workflow

Workflow systems are an emerging technology which have become increasingly important in the drive for businesses to provide better services and increase productivity. Intuitively, workflow applications are processes which automate and regulate the movement and execution of work across one or more servers, according to business-defined rules and routes. Lacking in the current workflow products is a way to specify both the temporal and the obligation constraints that are inherent for the effective and flexible flow of information among the activities. We propose using propositional temporal logic for specifying and reasoning over the temporal constraints in the workflow´s activities, and complement it with deontic logic, which is used to specify the commitments of participants in the course of the workflow. These two approaches are combined by forcing all messages to be communicated using pre-defined speech act primitives. By capturing these two important constraints in the workflow, we aim to provide a model that can react and adapt to organizational changes in a controlled way. We demonstrate our specification using a virtual conference planning workflow system