What is Business Process Management

In logistic environments, a process, in that it manages the flow of materials among partners, inherently involves more than one organization. In this regard, a logistic process can be considered as a combined process consisting of multiple sub processes, each of which is managed by a single participant. In achieving systematic management of a logistic process, traditional Business Process Management (BPM) cannot be used for the entire flow, since it lacks the ability to manage interactions among partners. In this paper, then, we propose inter-workflow patterns that represent the relations among separate processes. We specify the inter-workflow patterns between processes, which patterns enable the generation of ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules to control the execution of the logistic process. A rule engine can then take charge of managing the interactions among processes. A prototype system was developed for the purpose of demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.