An operational approach to the design of workflow systems

2001

Workflow management aims at modeling and executing application processes in complex technical and organizational environments. Modern information systems are often based on object-oriented design techniques, for instance, the Unified Modeling Language (UML). These systems consist of application objects which collaborate to achieve a common goal. Although application objects collaborate in the context of business processes that can be supported by workflow technology, workflow modeling is typically done with proprietary workflow languages. Hence, two separate formalisms are present for modeling application objects and workflows. In this paper we try to remedy this situation by proposing the use of Object Coordination Nets (OCoN) for workflow modeling. OCoN nets provide a seamless integration with UML structure diagrams. The OCoN formalism also helps to deal with all relevant aspects of modeling complex workflow systems in a scalable and consistent manner.

Requirements Engineering, 2002

Workflow management systems are becoming a relevant support for a large class of business applications, and many workflow models as well as commercial products are currently available. While the large availability of tools facilitates the development and the fulfilment of customer requirements, workflow application development still requires methodological guidelines that drive the developers in the complex task of rapidly producing effective applications. In fact, it is necessary to identify and model the business processes, to design the interfaces towards existing cooperating systems, and to manage implementation aspects in an integrated way. This paper presents the WIRES methodology for developing workflow applications under a uniform modelling paradigm -UML modelling tools with some extensions -that covers all the life cycle of these applications: from conceptual analysis to implementation. High-level analysis is performed under different perspectives, including a business and an organisational perspective. Distribution, interoperability and cooperation with external information systems are considered in this early stage. A set of 'workflowability' criteria is provided in order to identify which candidate processes are suited to be implemented as workflows. Nonfunctional requirements receive particular emphasis in that they are among the most important criteria for deciding whether workflow technology can be actually useful for implementing the business process at hand. The design phase tackles aspects of concurrency and cooperation, distributed transactions and exception handling. Reuse of component workflows, available in a repository as workflow fragments, is a distinguishing feature of the method. Implementation aspects are presented in terms of rules that guide in the selection of a commercial workflow management system suitable for supporting the designed processes, coupled with guidelines for mapping the designed workflows onto the model offered by the selected system.

OOER'95: Object-Oriented and Entity …, 1995

Abstract. Workflow management is emerging as a challenging area for databases, stressing database technology beyond its current capabilities. Workflow management systems need to be more integrated with data management technology, in particular as it concerns the ...

Journal of Software Engineering and Applications

Workflow-based systems are typically said to lead to better use of staff and better management and productivity. The first phase in building a workflow-based system is capturing the real-world process in a conceptual representation suit-able for the following phases of formalization and implementation. The specification may be in text or diagram form or written in a formal language. This paper proposes a flow-based diagrammatic methodology as a tool for workflow specification. The expressiveness of the method is appraised though its ability to capture a workflow-based application. Here we show that the proposed conceptual diagrams are able to express situations arising in practice as an alternative to tools currently used in workflow systems. This is demonstrated by using the proposed methodology to partial build demo systems for two government agencies.

Proceedings of The IEEE, 1997

The complexity of modern enterprises makes enterprise modeling a major issue. The need for integrating several different features requires a powerful modeling technique, such as CIMOSA, able to represent functional, control, informational and organizational aspects. However, the study of a system yields limited results as long as it only consists of inspecting a static model. More effective results can be achieved if an operational (i.e. executable) model is available. This paper presents an approach to enterprise integration and a technique for building operational enterprise models based on the modeling language Opj. An interesting feature of Opj is the possibility of deriving a workflow prototype from an enterprise model.

This work presents the methodological and technical issues for the Designer tool in the OBJECT-FLOW 1 Workflow Management System. This tool provides to the user the possibility to model and design workflow diagrams from Business Process of a corporation. This project is the result of an industry-university cooperation.

This paper proposes a workflow specification formalism, based upon reactive objects. This formalism is valid for several paradigms such as message passing or agent oriented programming, and consequently may describe distinct workftows, that is flows of electronic documents and/or human activities. A contribution is the introduction of generic modules for determining specific architectures, e.g. specific multicast protocols, or agent instance creation. A basic workflow, for object collecting, is introduced as illustrative example. Several architecture definitions are then proposed for this example: static, hierarchical and dynamic architectures.

Workflow applications automate business processes. A common approach to the development of workflow applications usually consists of the description of the desired functionality directly followed by workflow implementation. This approach has the disadvantage that it considers mainly implementation issues and the developed application is no way related to the business process it automates. In this paper we claim that a systematic approach to workflow application development should start from the definition and understanding of the corresponding business process before proceeding to the specification and implementation of workflow applications. Along these lines, we present our experience and efforts to describe and analyze a real world business process and to design and implement corresponding workflows in a systematic way by using the formal Modified Petri Net (MPN) model for business process modeling and the commercial product FlowMark for workflow development. The advantages of this approach is also discussed.

Encyclopedia of Database Systems, 2009

O conte udo do presente relat orio e de unica responsabilidade do(s) autor(es). (The contents of this report are the sole responsibility of the author(s).

The paper presents motivations, the idea and design of an object-oriented declarative workflow management system. The main features that differ this system from many similar systems are: inherent parallelism of all workflow instances and tasks, the possibility of dynamic changes of running process instances and integration of workflow instances with an object-oriented database. Workflow instances, tasks, subtasks, etc., are implemented as so-called active objects, which are persistent data structures that can be queried and managed according to the syntax and semantics of a query language. and also possess active parts that are executable. The prototype has been implemented on the basis of ODRA, an object-oriented distributed database management system. As the workflow programming language we use SBQL, an object-oriented database query and programming language developed for ODRA.

2008

Modeling processes and workflow for complex systems constitutes a challenge for designers. The resources that are used in systems are in limited amounts and these must be shared between the processes and workflow instances activities. Our considerations refer to the need of a data base in that the workflow constituents: instances and activities must be represented in a data base and also their time evolution. Concerning the resources that are used in the processes and in the workflow instances execution must be adequately represented. Two important classes of information systems, Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, have been used to support e-business process redesign, integration, and management. We intend to propose a model for resource representation and allocation and as conclusion propose considerations concerning the design of processes, workflows and workflow management systems. This paper is partially supported by the project P...

Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering, 2007

The Unified Model Language (UML) has nine diagrams. One of them is the activity diagram. This allows the modeling of business processes. A business process is a set of logically related tasks executed to achieve a business result. Workflow systems are those systems based on software that allow automating total or partially a business process. Workflow is defined as a set of methods and technologies that offer facilities for the modeling and administration of diverse processes that happen inside a company. The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) has established a standard that allows the interoperability among applications workflow. The proposed standard includes a model of the workflow processes, Workflow Metamodel, and a language of specification of processes in XML (XPDL). ArgoUML is a CASE tool for the analysis and design of objects oriented software systems. ArgoUML uses NSUML metamodel implementing the UML metamodel defined by the Objet Management Group (OMG). The ArgoUML tool is open source and it allows building all the types of defined diagrams in UML. In this work, we propose an extension of the NSUML, the core of ArgoUML metamodel. In this way, the ArgoUML incorporates the possibility to model and to simulate workflow processes.

2001

This paper introduces definition and enactment models to characterize workflows. The proposed knowledge model provides concepts for modeling activities, data used by such activities, agents, and ordering operators and synchronization modes used for specifying activities dependencies. The behavior model provides dimensions that characterize workflow enactment. Both models are currently implemented in our workflow management system called AFLOWS.

Ibm Systems Journal, 1997

A significant number of companies are reengineering their business to be more effective and productive. Consequently, existing applications must be modified, and new applications must be written. The new applications typically run in a distributed and heterogeneous environment, performing single tasks in parallel, and demanding special transaction functionality for the supporting environments. Workflow-based applications offer this type of capability. In this paper, their principal advantages are derived and set in context to transaction, object, and CASE (computer-assisted software engineering) technology. In particular, a method is proposed to develop these workflow-based applications in a cohesive and consistent way.

Journal of Information Processing Systems

Service-oriented computing offers efficient solutions for executing complex applications in an acceptable amount of time. These solutions provide important computing and storage resources, but they are too difficult for individual users to handle. In fact, Service-oriented architectures are usually sophisticated in terms of design, specifications, and deployment. On the other hand, workflow management systems provide frameworks that help users to manage cooperative and interdependent processes in a convivial manner. In this paper, we propose a workflow-based approach to fully take advantage of new service-oriented architectures that take the users' skills and the internal complexity of their applications into account. To get to this point, we defined a novel framework named JASMIN, which is responsible for managing service-oriented workflows on distributed systems. JASMIN has two main components: unified modeling language (UML) to specify workflow models and business process execution language (BPEL) to generate and compose Web services. In order to cover both workflow and service concepts, we describe in this paper a refinement of UML activity diagrams and present a set of rules for mapping UML activity diagrams into BPEL specifications.