Working group report on process [production process workflow in cooperative virtual enterprises]

The process workgroup was given the task of studying the production process workflow in cooperative (virtual) enterprises, such as large software houses or companies needing concurrent engineering methods, e.g., for designing and making industrial products. We initiated our agenda by studying the main requirements of tools and environments which could entitle them to support production processes. In our vision, the main tools for supporting process design are descriptive notations for process modeling. Such notations should be formal, to help in understanding, analysing, and simulating the process models we describe. Our requirements for the environment were more vague: we envision an environment distributed on heterogeneous hardware, with a rich infrastructure of services, like distributed object databases and hypertext browsers like the WWW. More important, the environment should be able to "understand" the process model to be supported and enacted, i.e., it should be able to reconfigure itself, possibly dynamically, to support and enforce ("enact") the workflow defined by the process model. The agenda we discussed included a survey of existing tools and notations for process modeling, which we summarize, an overview of research trends in the recent past, is outlined and, finally, a study of interesting scenarios and case studies worthy of being explored in the near future is discussed.