Valmont: a language for workflow programming

Dpd, 1995

Today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.

1996

Workflow Management (WM) is an emerging area that involves cross-disciplinary fields as Database, Software Engineering, Business Management, Human Coordination. A Workflow Management System (WMS) is a software tool to automate Business Processes (BPs) and coordinate people of an organization. BPs are a set of linked procedures concentrated on reaching a business goal, normally following a set of procedural rules. This work presents the OBJECTFLOW project, result of the cooperation between an industrial partner, the Centro de Cálculo de Sabadell (CCS, a software company located near Barcelona), and the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). The main aim of OBJECTFLOW project is constructing a flexible WMS to automate BPs of the medium and big enterprise, allowing the integration to existing software systems.

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.

Lectures on Concurrency and Petri Nets, 2004

Over the last decade there has been a shift from "data-aware" information systems to "process-aware" information systems. To support business processes an enterprise information system needs to be aware of these processes and their organizational context. Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of such operational business processes. BPM can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. This tutorial introduces models, systems, and standards for the design, analysis, and enactment of workflow processes. Petri nets are used for the modeling and analysis of workflows. Using Petri nets as a formal basis, contemporary systems, languages, and standards for BPM and WFM are discussed. Although it is clear that Petri nets can serve as a solid foundation for BPM/WFM technology, in reality systems, languages, and standards are developed in an ad-hoc fashion. To illustrate this XPDL, the "Lingua Franca" proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), is analyzed using a set of 20 basic workflow patterns. This analysis exposes some of the typical semantic problems restricting the application of BPM/WFM technology.

1999

In the past decade, many research efforts have gone into the object-oriented development of information systems and the design of workflow systems. Both domains however, have largely evolved independently. Nevertheless, particular advantages of object-orientedness such as reusability, scalability and portability can be useful in workflow systems. Obviously, strategic advantages that have been gained by analysing business environments with a process view are also important when considering object-oriented developments. In this paper we will describe the necessary requirements to model a business process using the object-oriented approach. Next, we will discuss two approaches to combine workflow systems with object-oriented development: the pure and the mixed approach. Both methods have their strengths and weaknesses and none can claim to be the best solution. We will conclude by giving a short overview of existing models and applications in both approaches.

14th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing (PDP'06), 2006

The different approaches of emerging workflow modeling languages are manifold. Today, there exist many notations for workflow modeling with various specializations on different domains. In this paper we analyze three well known business process (workflow) modeling notations for their support for elaborated key aspects in workflow modeling. The aim of this paper is to discuss their differences and commonalities concerning these aspects.

1998

Abstract This paper presents a workflow specification language developed in the WIDE project. The language provides a rich organisation model, an information model including presentation details, and a sophisticated process model. Workflow application developers should find the language a useful and compact means to capture and investigate design details.

1999

Abstract Meta-Languages for the definition of processes serve several purposes. They can be employed as an integration platform for the exchange of process models that are specified in proprietary languages, their expressiveness can serve as a benchmark for the selection of a application specific modeling language and they can be used for the application-independent specification of process models that can then be transformed into the language relevant for the domain-specific context.

Grid Middleware and Services, 2008

A variety of grid middlewares and workflow languages causes the existence of many workflow management systems (WfMS). Formalisms used to represent workflows vary from simple Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) to more complex (non deterministic) Petri Nets. Therefore a workflow description is strictly bound to a particular WfMS and to the computational resources that WfMS address, as far as no cooperation among WfMSs exists. This might be critical in scientific workflows where a large amount of resources is usually needed. In this paper we propose a WfMS that aims at language independence and Grid middleware abstraction dealing with interoperability as proposed in the reference model of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC). The main goal of such WfMS is to provide an effective solution to run complex scientific workflows (legacy or not) taking full advantage of the distributed and etherogeneous nature of the Grid. A Petri Net formalism has been chosen as internal representation due to its formal behavioral description and the existence of several analysis tools. Our proposed WfMS will be implemented on top of the gLite Grid middleware provided by the EGEE project because of its stability and large adoption.

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.