A Collaborative Approach to Distributed Heterogeneous Process Engines for Cross-Organizations

Abstract

In today’s complex and rapidly changing business environment, the traditional single-organization service model can no longer meet the needs of multi-organization collaborative processing. Based on existing business process engine technologies, this paper proposes a distributed heterogeneous process engine collaboration method for cross-organizational scenarios. The core of this method lies in achieving unified access and management of heterogeneous engines through a business process model adapter and a common operation interface. The key technologies include: Meta-Process Control Architecture, where the central engine (meta-process scheduler) decomposes the original process into fine-grained sub-processes and schedules their execution in a unified order, ensuring consistency with the original process logic; Process Model Adapter, which addresses the BPMN2.0 model differences among heterogeneous engines such as Flowable and Activiti through a matching-and-replacement mechanism, providing a unified process model standard for different engines; Common Operation Interface, which encapsulates the REST APIs of heterogeneous engines and offers a single, standardized interface for process deployment, instance management, and status synchronization. This method integrates multiple techniques to address API differences, process model incompatibilities, and execution order consistency issues among heterogeneous engines, delivering a unified, flexible, and scalable solution for cross-organizational process collaboration.