Abstract
(English)
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It has often been pointed out that information technologies could play a significant role in supporting the coordination structure by providing better means to interact and monitor the interaction as well as by creating new business opportunities. This 'electronic medium', capable of delivering value added services to the participants, encompasses many different technological areas: from communication to security, databases, and transaction support, among many others. Of these, the project has concentrated on an essential component of such electronic medium: workflow management services. In particular, the goal of the project was to develop an adaptable workflow engine through which the activities of the different participants in the project (several german compnies) can be harmonized, combined, and expanded through better tracking of functional dependencies, improved data access and handling, and lower administrative overheads. Existing workflow products have proven their ability to achieve considerable improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and flexibility by coordinating and streamlining complex business processes within organizations. In order to bring these advantages to companies so that they can gain a substantial competitive edge, existing commercial products need to be enhanced and extended: current workflow systems are complex to install, use and maintain, have only limited resilience to failures since they do not support a truly distributed architecture, have poor scalability, and are too inflexible to cope with the characteristics of the maritime industry. Furthermore, existing Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) fail to satisfy the user expectations in areas such as handling heterogeneity and interoperability, providing data consistency, and providing advanced security mechanisms. The workflow engine that has been developed as part of this project addresses these crucial issues with a special emphasis on the ease of use, maintenance, and customization to the needs of maritime industry.
The project successfully concluded in March, 2001. The prototype developed under the leadership of ETH Zürich is now in production use at the industrial partners. The work has been widely publicised in several conference and journal papers. The prototype is also been used in several undergraduate courses and workshops with industrial participation. Three Ph.D. dissertations are directly connected to the project: two successfully finished and one that will be completed at the end of 2001.
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