Thesis
Today's business organizations must deal with constant changes in their organizational structure and markets. This requires organizations to become agile through the adoption of increasingly flexible and information processing oriented business models.
The concepts of workflows or business processes have become the main enablers of business environments. The trend to an increasing agility demands decoupling business process modeling from its execution, in comparison with classical workflows, which consist in a fixed sequence of concrete business tasks. The flexibility of such loosely coupled process models however entails new interoperability and security research challenges notably due to the need for supporting interactions beyond business boundaries and between a priori unknown actors .
The main contribution of this thesis is the introduction of the notion of document-based agile workflow system. A basic methodology for modeling such workflows and their execution is first presented based on a declarative approach to processing the exchanged documents, which organizes and combines strategic business goals and rules into a unified framework. The use of an ontology based model for the semantic annotation of document data is then proposed as a solution for interoperability. That approach also provides the basic mechanism of a decentralized communication infrastructure supporting document distribution between actors during the execution of a document-based agile workflow. Security mechanisms are finally defined to enforce fine-grained document access control and document integrity, as well as dynamic key management among workflow participants.
Type:
Thesis
Date:
2010-06-30
Department:
Digital Security
Eurecom Ref:
3148
Copyright:
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