Abstract
Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is an important Internet application that is significantly changing the way of commercial transaction. Due to the complexity of E-commerce systems and lack of well-designed formal models, providing a suitable method for their modeling and monitoring turns out to be a challenging job. This paper introduces labeled workflow nets (LWN) and their semantics on the basis of labeled Petri nets. Then an inter-organizational labeled workflow net (ILWN) - which can graphically model the dynamic behavior of the systems - is presented. Furthermore, the nonblocking property of ILWNs is defined to achieve a common goal of E-commerce participants. This nonblocking property helps to analyze the soundness of ILWNs and the undeniable property of interactive actions. The proposed framework for E-commerce workflows (ECW) can record a history of interactive events and monitor the execution of interactive activities to achieve a common goal. Therefore, it can elegantly model the execution of interorganizational workflows and analyze the accountability of cooperative activities. The main contribution of the paper is to present a new formal mechanism - ILWN. It can efficiently support the modeling and monitoring of ECWs. Finally, this paper illustrates how to use the proposed method by modeling and analyzing a Customer-Producer-Supplier example.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 995-1006 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Information sciences |
Volume | 179 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 15 2009 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Software
- Control and Systems Engineering
- Theoretical Computer Science
- Computer Science Applications
- Information Systems and Management
- Artificial Intelligence
Keywords
- Electronic commerce workflow
- Labeled workflow net
- Modeling
- Monitoring
- Soundness