Flexibility in Cross-organizational WS-BPEL Business Processes

Cross-organizational business processes involve interactions offered as services which are orchestrated across multiple organizations. As in local intra-organizational processes, this type of processes also needs to handle exceptional situations, in order to become more flexible and automatically managed by business process management systems. Typically, exception handling is defined locally within the scope of an intra-organizational business process, using the appropriate business process modelling language constructs. However, these constructs do not foresee exceptions that occur in cross- organizational processes. In this paper we propose a WS-BPEL extension to define an interface between cross- organizational processes, in order to monitor the state of each interacting process and, consequently, define cross- organizational exception behaviour. We also present a prototype implementation of our proposed extensions by using a model transformation approach and an open-source business process engine.