MARIFLOW - A Workflow Management System for the Maritime Industry

ESPRIT INCO project 972496
The aim of the EU research project MARIFlow project is to develop an architecture for automating the flow of data inside and between enterprises. In particular, the goal is to develop an adaptable workflow engine over the Internet through which the activities of different parties in the maritime industry can be defined, co-ordinated, combined and monitored. The business drivers for such a system are: better tracking of functional dependencies, improved data access and handling with lower administrative overheads.

Within a demonstration scenario realistic industrial requirements have been defined for the prototype. Its primary focus in the project is handling, exchange, and usage of electronic data and documents in the context of  material certification. The basis for this automated exchange and subsequent processing of data will be a workflow description that has to be defined initially between the commercial partners, e.g. steel mill, classification society and boiler manufacturer. Other parties, e.g. customers who are using certificates may plug into the workflow at a later stage. 

The project will make use of latest technologies from the fields of communication, security, databases, and transaction support to develop a prototype of an workflow management system. Key element of the technolgy are so-called MARCAs (MARIFlow Co-operating Agents), who are automatically initialised at each partners site in the process. Those agents handle all activities at their site, provide for co-ordination with other agents in the system by routing the documents in electronic form according to the process description, keeping track of process information, and providing for the security and authentication of documents as well as comprehensive monitoring facilities. Each organisation may have in-house applications inside a firewall protected from unauthorised accesses. 
 
Project start: Sep 15, 1998
Project Duration: 2 years 3 month

The consortium consists of the following partners:

  • Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Technical co-ordinator, TR)
  • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (CH)
  • The Hebrew University (Israel)
  • Germanischer Lloyd, Hamburg (D)
  • Balance Technology Consulting, Bremen (D)
  • Salzgitter AG (D)
  • ISISAN (TR)

To the official MARIFlow Project Homepage