A secure service-based collaborative workflow system
Duncan J. Russell, Peter M. Dew, Karim Djemame · International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management · 2007
This paper addresses a need to control collaborative access to shared web service resources (grid services) in workflows. The workflows are executed by users from different organisations who act in roles in a business process. These workflows execute services across organisations, which create service instances that can be accessed by different users during the workflow lifetime. Controlling collaborative access to service instances is difficult when the users are from distributed organisations and the access changes during the service instance lifetime. Current access control techniques provide constraints for users mapped to roles and the roles assigned to tasks. However, we extend this by proposing a framework to include collaborative access to service instances. These service instances execute workflow tasks and are temporary assets for collaborative use. The Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment (DAME) project is used to demonstrate a collaborative portal and Workflow Management System (WFMS) in which teams of users from different organisations share grid service instances. After evaluation, the resulting proposed solution uses a dynamic Workflow Team Policy to maintain users in roles and record service instances as temporal business assets.