CorPN: managing instance correspondence in collaborative business processes

Driven by the booming global business, organisations are required to align their business processes into an inter-connected network. The sophisticated nature of collaboration results in dynamic and complex interactions and correlations between participating business processes. This inevitably poses challenges to business process management in terms of recognising the instance correspondence and analysing the interaction behaviours of collaborative business processes. Nevertheless, this issue has received very limited attention from inter-organisational workflow research. In this paper, a novel correspondence Petri net model called CorPN is developed to specify instance correspondence with extensions to classical WF-Nets. In addition, a method is established to analyse the behavioural properties of CorPN nets for the purpose of process verification and examination.