An overview of workflow management: From process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure

Abstract

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 ~nd mission ofworkflow 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.

WorkflowNet2BPEL4WS: A Tool for Translating Unstructured Workflow Processes to Readable BPEL

“…Since the early nineties workflow technology has matured [20] and several textbooks have been published, e.g., [6,13,23,29]. During this period many languages for modeling workflows have been proposed, i.e., languages ranging from generic Petri-netbased languages to tailor-made domain-specific languages.…”

Model Fragmentation for Distributed Workflow Execution: A Petri Net Approach

“…3 we know that in the fragments we obtained, places are classified into two categories, one is the kind of places which exist in the original CWF-net, for example, p 0 and p 1 in fragment f 1 , we call this kind of places common places; the other is the places generated by the dup function, we call them duplicated places, for example, p 21 and p 31 in fragment f 1 . For places of different types, we have different firing rules.…”

“…Workflow is the key technology for the coordination of various business processes, such as loan approval and customer order processing [1]. By setting up the process model and enacting it in the workflow server, it can help to streamline the business process, deliver tasks and documents among users, and monitor the overall performance of the process.…”

Worklets: A Service-Oriented Implementation of Dynamic Flexibility in Workflows

“…the classification into ad-hoc, administrative, and production workflows in [30]). While it is not the intention of this paper to provide a complete overview of the work done in this area, reference is made here to a number of quite different approaches to providing dynamic flexibility in workflows.…”