An Approach for Modeling and Coordinating Process Interactions

In any enterprise, different entities collaborate to achieve common business objectives. The processes used to reach these objectives have relations and, therefore, depend on each other. Their proper coordination within a process-aware information system requires coping with heterogeneous granularity of processes, unclear process relations, and increased process model complexity due
to the integration of coordination constraints into process models. This paper presents the concept of coordination processes, which constitute a means to handle the interactions between a multitude of interdependent processes running asynchronously to each other. Particularly, coordination processes leverage the clear identification of process relations, a defined granularity for processes, and the abstraction from details of the individual processes in order to provide a robust
framework, enabling proper coordination support for interdependent processes.