Workflow Modeling for Virtual Enterprise: a Petri Net Based Process-View Approach

At present, the research of workflow modeling has been extended to the context of virtual enterprise in order to realize business process integration among member enterprises. Petri net and its extensions are classic modeling methods in workflow modeling, while the process-view is a promising approach used in workflow composition. This paper proposes a novel Petri net based process-view method to model workflow for virtual enterprise and concentrates on the mapping from the Petri net based base workflow model to its corresponding process-views, which incorporates the coordination of control flow and data flow. During the mapping process, abstract place and logical transition are proposed and added in order to abstract information from the base workflow model and also to ensure that the process-views are complete Petri net workflow models. At last, an integrated workflow model can be obtained by integrating the process-views, which is the interface to realize cross-organizational business process integration