WIFAi - A Tool Suite for the Modeling and Enactment of Inter-organizational Workflows

It is well documented that problems of response and the delivery of services during the hours and days immediately following the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center were due, in part, to poorly integrated workflows. Previous research at Monmouth University has studied the operations of Incident Command Centers and has resulted in the development of an intuitive tool to model dynamic workflows for these centers. This tool, however, was designed as a standalone application that did not allow for the interaction among workflows. A significant reengineering effort, described in this work, was undertaken to convert the aforementioned standalone tool to a distributed architecture that supports inter-organizational workflows and allows for future growth. As such, a workflow engine based on the Workflow Management Coalition Reference Model was created to execute both modeling and enactment of inter-organizational workflows. Web services were developed to expose engine functionality to clients. A persistency model was introduced for storing both the workflow models and instances. A primitive role-based access to the workflows was added for security purposes. The implementation described herein supports three types of inter-organizational workflow communication: notification, asynchronous and synchronous communications.