RNM based decentralized architecture of cross-organizational workflow management system for e-government

With the rapid development of e-government, the business process management for e-government has been gradually changing from intra-organization to cross-organization. The cross-organizational business process brings new characteristics such as complexity, instance intensive, loosely coupled and dynamic. As a result, there are some disadvantages to use traditional centerialized workflow management system (WFMS) for cross-organizational business process, i.e. a single point of failure, poor scalability and performance bottleneck. In this paper, we use Role Network Model (RNM) as modelling method of cross-organizational business process for e-government, which satisfies new characteristics of cross-organizational business process. Then, based on RNM, a decentralized architecture of cross-organizaitional WFMS for e-government is proposed, which avoids disadvantages of centralized WFMS. Finaly, a control mechanism based on the proposed architecture is presented to ensure workflow executed correctly.