Sensors and Guards in a Context-aware Workflow Environment

Abstract

We propose a system for integrating context awareness in workflow management systems. The context is captured via simple or complex sensors. The workflow management systems interacts with these sensors and can use data about the environment in making decisions about the control flow. Since the environment-and thus the context of workflow execution-may change, we introduce sensor guards which monitor the sensors during specified critical parts of the workflow execution and raise an exception when the data transmitted by sensors leave their expected ranges.