Applying the Process Interchange Format (PIF) to a Supply Chain Process Interoperability Scenario S. T. Polyak and J. Lee and M. Gruninger and C. Menzel Abstract. The goal of the PIF Project is to develop an interchange format to help automatically exchange process descriptions among a wide variety of business process modelling and support systems such as workflow software, flow charting tools, process simulation systems, and process repositories. As an example of such an exchange, a demonstration scenario has been created which describes the use of PIF in the modelling and simulation of an integrated supply chain where different companies co-operate through a global supply chain management procedure to deliver commercial electronic goods. This scenario coordinates the exchange of process knowledge between a business process modelling tool/library (Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Process Handbook) and a process simulation package (Knowledge Based System Inc.’s (KBSI) ProSim) with PIF acting as the interlingua. 1 INTRODUCTION There have been a number of initiatives to standardise shared lan- guages and ontologies within the general subject area of activities and processes. These include Enterprise Processes – Process Interchange Format (PIF) [18] – Enterprise Ontology [7, 27] – Toronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) ontology [6] Workflow Processes – International Workflow Management Coalition’s Workflow Process Definition Language (WPDL) [28] Manufacturing Processes – NIST’s Process Specification Language [25] Case Tools – Case Data Interchange Format (CDIF) [23] Planning – Shared Planning and Activity Representation 5 (SPAR) [26] Dept. of Artificial Intelligence, The University of Edinburgh, 80 South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1HN, UK, E-mail: Steve Polyak@ed.ac.uk Dept. of Decision Sciences, University of Hawaii 2404 Maile Way, Hon- olulu, HI, 96825, USA, E-mail: jl@hawaii.edu Enterprise Integration Laboratory (EIL), Dept. of Industrial Engineer- ing, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1A4, Canada, E-mail: gruninger@ie.utoronto.ca Dept. of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843- 4237, USA, E-mail: cmenzel@tamu.edu Details on the Shared Planning and Activity Representation are available at: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/ arpi/spar/ During the various stages of design, development, deployment, ex- tension and maintenance of these languages (and their underlying ontologies) it can be very helpful to engage in some form of scen- ario analysis [10, 13, 15]. Scenario analysis has been defined in a software-engineering context as “the process of understanding, analysing, and describing sys- tem behaviour in terms of particular ways the system is expec- ted to be used.” [13] In the case of shared representation languages (e.g. PIF), we can amend this definition of scenario analysis to read “the process of understanding, analysing, and describing know- ledge representation in terms of particular ways the lan- guage/ontology is expected to be used.” The goal of the PIF Project is to develop an interchange format to help automatically exchange process descriptions among a wide vari- ety of business process modelling and support systems such as work- flow software, flow charting tools, process simulation systems, and process repositories. As an example of such an exchange, a demon- stration scenario [24] has been created which describes the use of PIF in the modelling and simulation of an integrated supply chain (cf. [8, 1, 17]) where different companies co-operate through a global supply chain management procedure to deliver commercial elec- tronic goods. Specifically, PIF acts as a common, shared language between tools used in the re-engineering of these business processes which occur between a manufacturer, retailer, distributor, warehous- ing company and transportation company 6 . This scenario illustrates the fact that PIF is primarily a translation language, not an execut- able language or even a modelling language except to the extent that is needed for translation. As a consequence, its design philosophy favours generality over efficiency, minimal core over redundancy, and allowance for multiple alternative extensions (see section 2.1). It should also be noted that PIF’s insistence on formal semantics (for translatability) is unique as compared to other “process languages”. This is discussed in section 5. This work represents one of the initial attempts at defining a real- istic business scenario in which PIF may be applied. Previous ef- forts focused on a simpler example in the domain of civil engineering design. This was used to assist in the construction of the set of PIF core elements. The recent scenario work provides a framework for evaluating, challenging and extending the elements defined within the PIF-Core. This paper presents a couple of examples from this This scenario was adapted from the Workflow Management Coalition’s (WfMC) workflow interoperability demonstration presented at the 1996 Business Process and Workflow Conference in Amsterdam.