Modeling and planning collaboration using organizational constraints

Process management systems play an important role for today's information systems. They coordinate the work items among employees and ensure the correct execution of processes. In this paper we focus on the organizational perspective of process management systems. This perspective is responsible for assigning people together with their roles within business organizations to process execution. A key issue in integrating the organizational perspective into processes is the strategy for selecting people to execute work steps. This assignment is the basis for collaboration among the people of an organization within a process-based application. We implemented our approach in ESProNa, a Logtalk application running in SWI-Prolog extended with the Thea library providing direct and complete support for OWL2 ontologies. The use of these languages allows the definition of comprehensive organizational constraints. We will cover both, the definition of these constraints in the process model, and their interpretation by the process execution engine. Further we will show how the organizational perspective impacts the order of process execution, i. e. the way of collaboration between the assigned people decisively.