Support of cooperating and distributed business processes

Workflow management systems/business process management systems (BPMS) provide for an integral support of computer-based information processing, personal activities, business procedures and their relationships to organizational structures. They support the modeling and analysis of so-called business processes and offer means for the application-near design and implementation of computer-based business process assistance. Mainly, the BPMSs concentrate on the support of enterprise-internal processes. Our approach extends the scope of business process management. Enterprise-internal processes are viewed as sub-processes of global inter-enterprise processes. Additional global process assistance is based on the definition of global activity models and global information models. Features of dynamic naming and binding can be provided by business process brokers, which extend the concepts of object trading to the trading of opportunities to participate in global processes.