From coordination of workflow and group activities to composition and management of virtual enterprises

The objective of the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI) project at MCC is the development of technologies that support a wide class of advanced applications requiring synchronous and asynchronous coordination of activities executed by human and software agents. CMI integrates a number of technologies having their origin in workflow and process management, groupware, and document management and provides additional solutions to the problems of dynamic process modification at run time, customizable awareness of the process status, and integration of external services. We describe the Collaboration Management Model and describe briefly its implementation using a collection of commercial tools augmented with new components providing the advanced functionality. We also describe briefly further extension to the model needed to provide support for a new class of applications implementing the concept of a virtual enterprise.