******************************************
First International Workshop on
Coordination of Inter-Organizational Workflow:
Agent and Semantic Web based Models (CIOW-2006).
May 8, 2006
http://www.irit.fr/ciow
*****************
Within AAMAS-06
Hakodate, Japan, 8-12 May 2006
http://www.fun.ac.jp/aamas2006/
Motivation & Theme
****************
Workflow systems are widely adopted by organizations for supporting
business processes. In particular, workflow systems
help organizations to coordinate the different actors involved in the
business process by automating repetitive tasks and
facilitating the distribution of documents, information and control.
Today's workflow systems, however, do not adequately
support processes that cross the boundaries of multiple organizations. The
enhancement of workflow systems in this
direction, Inter-Organizational Workflows (IOW), is essential given the
growing need for organizations to cooperate and
coordinate their activities in order to meet the new demands of highly
dynamic and open markets. The different
organizations involved in such cooperation must correlate their respective
resources and skills, and coordinate their
respective business processes towards a common goal, corresponding to a
value-added service.
Coordination in IOW raises several problems such as the definition of the
universe of discourse -without which it would not
be possible to solve the various semantic conflicts that are bound to occur
between several autonomous and heterogeneous
workflows-, the finding of partners, the negotiation of the processes
themselves between partners according to certain
criteria (due time, precision, visibility of the process evolution, way of
doing it
), and the synchronization of the distributed
and concurrent execution of these different processes. Moreover,
organizations are shifting from the typical static case of
the "virtual enterprises" to a dynamic case where dynamic relations and
alliances are established. Workflow and
process-support tools have been widely studied for this static case
investigating issues concerning inter-operability,
process control, awareness and reliability, etc. The dynamic case has been
less widely examined, and tools developed in the
static case cannot be straightforwardly adapted. Therefore new issues must
be considered: tools and generic models for
negotiation and contracts enactment and monitoring, processes mechanisms
for workflow service discovery and matching,
...
Agent technology provides natural abstractions to deal with autonomy,
distribution, and coordination which are inherent to
IOW. Moreover, when IOW is deployed in the context of virtual enterprises,
agent technology can help by providing high
level organizational concepts to adequately describe the macro-level
dimension of such an alliance. Indeed, adopting a
multi-agent organizational view enables to inherit powerful and
experimented abstractions and representation concepts, like
roles, groups, teams, interactions protocols, responsibilities,
authorities, permissions. These aspects constitute a conceptual
tool that would probably ease an adequate capture and modelling of IOW
organization.
The Semantic Web is also a useful and complementary enabling technology. It
first helps to represent a shared business
view through a common terminology or ontology. It also provides means to
describe, discover and select relevant workflow
services offered by business partners.
Furthermore, the combination of these two technologies would renew the way
to consider IOW and open enormous
opportunities for building advanced infrastructures to support IOW
coordination. Agents would help to mediate between
heterogeneous and autonomous business processes to obtain consensus
representations. Workflow services could also be
agentified and then would be able to negotiate with peers the qualities of
services, their compositions, and more generally
the conditions of their cooperation towards a specific goal. On the other
hand, interaction protocols of such agents would
be recorded in an ontology and selected intelligently at run time according
to the situation.
Main Objective
************
This workshop will try to address the following issue: how agent and/or
semantic web technologies can help in designing
and implementing adequate coordination models for Inter-Organizational
Workflow. It is meant to cover foundations,
techniques, methodologies and applications of Inter-Organizational Workflow
coordination by means of Agent and/or
Semantic Web technologies. The workshop is interdisciplinary in nature and
open to contributions from fields as varied as
Multi-Agent Systems, Workflow, Cooperative Information Systems and Semantic
Web.
Topics
*****
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- business process sharing, ontology;
- coordination mechanisms for IOW;
- organization-oriented coordination of IOW;
- interaction protocols between workflows;
- workflow interaction mining;
- contracts enactment and monitoring;
- distributed agent-based workflow enactment;
- semantic workflow composition;
- transactions over heterogeneous distributed workflows;
- techniques for workflow web services;
- workflow services description, discovery and invocation;
- workflow capacity description language;
- workflow service agentification;
- IOW architecture;
- IOW representation with OWL-S and WSMO;
- Industrial applications.
Paper Submission
**************
We solicit original papers not exceeding 8 pages in length (according to
the IEEE format of the AAMAS conference,
http://www.aamas2005.nl/paper_submissions-old.php ). Submissions will be
assessed on their scientific content,
significance, originality, quality and clarity. Each paper will be reviewed
by at least 2 anonymous reviewers.
Submissions should be sent in PDF (or PS) format via email to Chihab
Hanachi: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
At least one author of each accepted papers must register for the workshop.
Important Dates
************
Deadline for Paper Submission: February 1, 2006
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: February 19, 2006
Deadline for Camera-Ready Paper: March 15, 2006
Workshop date: May, 8, 2006.
Program Chair
***********
Chihab Hanachi, IRIT and University Toulouse 1, France
Program Committee
***************
Khalid Ben Ali, University of Nancy, France,
Boualem Benattalah, University of New South Wales, Australia
Brian Blake, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USA.
Olivier Boissier, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines of Saint-Etienne, France
Francisco Curbera, IBM, USA
Dickson K. W. Chiu, Dickson Computer Systems, Hong Kong, China
Monica Divitini, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.
Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina, USA
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts, USA
Aris Ouksel, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
Ricardo Rabelo, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brasil
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna in Cesena., Italy
Munindar Singh, North Carolina State University, USA
Nahid Shahmehri, Linkoping University, Sweden
Christophe Sibertin-Blanc, IRIT -University Toulouse 1
Katia Sycara, CMU, USA
José Vidal, University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA
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