Termination Handling in Inter-Organisational Workflows - An Exception Management Approach

The co-ordination of business processes across organisational boundaries requires an approach for assigning costs to the business partners in the case of (partial) failure of a process. Responsibility for costs in the case where work does not proceed as expected is usually defined in a contract. Current, more advanced workflow models and Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) built accordingly take into account how to deal with failure of a part of a process, but do not resolve the issue of responsibility for costs of activities. This paper proposes an approach for the handling of terminations in inter-organisational business processes that are enacted using WfMSs.