Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. It can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. Although the practical relevance of BPM is undisputed, a clear definition of BPM and related acronyms such as BAM, BPA, and STP are missing. Moreover, a clear scientific foundation is missing. In this paper, we try to demystify the acronyms in this domain, describe the state-of-the-art technology, and argue that BPM could benefit from formal methods/languages (cf. Petri nets, process algebras, etc.).

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Business process management: a survey

Today‘s workflow management systems (WFMS_s) are only applicable in a secure and safe manner if the business process (BP) to be supported is well-structured and there is no need for ad hoc deviations at run-time. As only few BPs are static in this sense, this significantly limits the applicability of current workflow (WF) technology. On the other hand, to support dynamic deviations from premodeled task sequences must not mean that the responsibility for the avoidance of consistency problems and run-time errors is now completely shifted to the (naive) end user. In this paper we present a formal foundation for the support of dynamic structural changes of running WF instances. Based upon a formal WF model (ADEPT), we define a complete and minimal set of change operations (ADEPT_flex) that support users in modifying the structure of a running WF, while maintaining its (structural) correctness and consistency. The correctness properties defined by ADEPT are used to determine whether a specific change can be applied to a given WF instance or not. If these properties are violated, the change is either rejected or the correctness must be restored by handling the exceptions resulting from the change. We discuss basic issues with respect to the management of changes and the undoing of temporary changes at the instance level. Recently we have started the design and implementation of ADEPT_workflow, the ADEPT workflow engine, which will make use of the change facilities presented in this paper.

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Adept _flex —Supporting Dynamic Changes of Workflows Without Losing Control

Service composition is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullet for the envisioned Semantic Web. It purports to take the Web to unexplored efficiencies and provide a flexible approach for promoting all types of activities in tomorrow’s Web. Applications expected to heavily take advantage of Web service composition include B2B E-commerce and E-government. To date, enabling composite services has largely been an ad hoc, time-consuming, and error-prone process involving repetitive low-level programming. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based framework for the automatic composition of Web services. We present a technique to generate composite services from high-level declarative descriptions. We define formal safeguards for meaningful composition through the use of composability rules. These rules compare the syntactic and semantic features of Web services to determine whether two services are composable. We provide an implementation using an E-government application offering customized services to indigent citizens. Finally, we present an exhaustive performance experiment to assess the scalability of our approach.

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Composing Web services on the Semantic Web

Transactional Information Systems is the long-awaited, comprehensive work from leading scientists in the transaction processing field. Weikum and Vossen begin with a broad look at the role of transactional technology in today's economic and scientific endeavors, then delve into critical issues faced by all practitioners, presenting today's most effective techniques for controlling concurrent access by multiple clients, recovering from system failures, and coordinating distributed transactions.


The authors emphasize formal models that are easily applied across fields, that promise to remain valid as current technologies evolve, and that lend themselves to generalization and extension in the development of new classes of network-centric, functionally rich applications. This book's purpose and achievement is the presentation of the foundations of transactional systems as well as the practical aspects of the field what will help you meet today's challenges.

* Provides the most advanced coverage of the topic available anywhere--along with the database background required for you to make full use of this material.
* Explores transaction processing both generically as a broadly applicable set of information technology practices and specifically as a group of techniques for meeting the goals of your enterprise.
* Contains information essential to developers of Web-based e-Commerce functionality--and a wide range of more "traditional" applications.
* Details the algorithms underlying core transaction processing functionality.

Table of Contents

PART ONE - BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION
Chapter 1 What Is It All About?
Chapter 2 Computational Models
PART TWO - CONCURRENCY CONTROL
Chapter 3 Concurrency Control: Notions of Correctness for the Page Model
Chapter 4 Concurrency Control Algorithms
Chapter 5 Multiversion Concurrency Control
Chapter 6 Concurrency Control on Objects: Notions of Correctness
Chapter 7 Concurrency Control Algorithms on Objects
Chapter 8 Concurrency Control on Relational Databases
Chapter 9 Concurrency Control on Search Structures
Chapter 10 Implementation and Pragmatic Issues
PART THREE - RECOVERY
Chapter 11 Transaction Recovery 
Chapter 12 Crash Recovery: Notion of Correctness
Chapter 13 Page Model Crash Recovery Algorithms
Chapter 14 Object Model Crash Recovery
Chapter 15 Special Issues of Recovery
Chapter 16 Media Recovery
Chapter 17 Application Recovery
PART FOUR - COORDINATION OF DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTIONS
Chapter 18 Distributed Concurrency Control
Chapter 19 Distributed Transaction Recovery
PART FIVE - APPLICATIONS AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES
Chapter 20 What Is Next?

Transactional Information Systems: Theory, Algorithms, and the Practice of Concurrency Control and Recovery

Business-to-Business (B2B) technologies pre-date the Web. They have existed for at least as long as the Internet. B2B applications were among the first to take advantage of advances in computer networking. The Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) business standard is an illustration of such an early adoption of the advances in computer networking. The ubiquity and the affordability of the Web has made it possible for the masses of businesses to automate their B2B interactions. However, several issues related to scale, content exchange, autonomy, heterogeneity, and other issues still need to be addressed. In this paper, we survey the main techniques, systems, products, and standards for B2B interactions. We propose a set of criteria for assessing the different B2B interaction techniques, standards, and products.

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Business-to-business interactions: issues and enabling technologies

Current workflow management systems fall short of supporting large-scale distributed, enterprise-wide applications. We present a scalable, rigorously founded approach to enterprise-wide workflow management, based on the distributed execution of state and activity charts. By exploiting the formal semantics of state and activity charts, we develop an algorithm for transforming a centralized state and activity chart into a provably equivalent partitioned one, suitable for distributed execution. A synchronization scheme is developed that guarantees an execution equivalent to a non-distributed one. This basic solution is further refined in order to reduce communication overhead and exploit parallelism between partitions whenever possible. The developed synchronization schemes are compared in terms of the number and size of synchronization messages.

From Centralized Workflow Specification to Distributed WorkflowExecution

This paper provides a formal foundation for distributed workflow executions. The state chart formalism is adapted to the needs of a workflow model in order to establish a basis for both correctness reasoning and run-time support for complex and large-scale workflow applications. To allow for the distributed execution of a workflow across different workflow servers, which is required for scalability and organizational decentralization, a method for the partitioning of workflow specifications is developed. It is proven that the partitioning preserves the original state chart's behavior.

A Formal Foundation for Distributed Workflow Execution Based on State Charts

This paper presents an approach towards the specification, verification, and distributed execution of workflows based on state and activity charts. The formal foundation of state and activity charts is exploited at three levels. At the specification level, the formalism enforces precise descriptions of business processes while also allowing subsequent refinements. In addition, precise specifications based on other methods can be automatically converted into state and activity charts. At the level of verification, state charts are amenable to the efficient method of model checking, in order to verify particularly critical workflow properties. Finally, at the execution level, a state chart specification forms the basis for the automatic generation of modules that can be directly executed in a distributed manner. Within the MENTOR project, a coherent prototype system has been built that comprises all three levels: specification, verification, and distributed execution.

Enterprise-wide workflow management based on state and activity charts

MENTOR (“Middleware for Enterprise-Wide Workflow Management”) is a joint project of the University of the Saarland, the Union Bank of Switzerland, and ETH Zurich [1, 2, 3]. The focus of the project is on enterprise-wide workflow management. Workflows in this category may span multiple organizational units each unit having its own workflow server, involve a variety of heterogeneous information systems, and require many thousands of clients to interact with the workflow management system (WFMS). The project aims to develop a scalable and highly available environment for the execution and monitoring of workflows, seamlessly integrated with a specification and verification environment.For the specification of workflows, MENTOR utilizes the formalism of state and activity charts. The mathematical rigor of the specification method establishes a basis for both correctness reasoning and for partitioning of a large workflow into a number of subworkflows according to the organizational responsibilities of the enterprise. For the distributed execution of the partitioned workflow specification, MENTOR relies mostly on standard middleware components and adds own components only where the standard components fall short of functionality or scalability. In particular, the run-time environment is based on a TP monitor and a CORBA implementation.

The MENTOR workbench for enterprise-wide workflow management

Der Artikel diskutiert die Spezifikation, Verifikation und verteilte Ausfuhrung von Workflows mit Hilfe von State- und Activitycharts. Die formale Fundierung der State- und Activitycharts wird auf drei Ebenen ausgenutzt. Auf der Spezifikationsebene erzwingt der verwendete Formalismus prazise Beschreibungen von Geschaftsprozessen, last jedoch ebenfalls spatere Verfeinerungen zu. Daruber hinaus konnen Spezifikationen, die mit anderen Methoden erstellt wurden, weitgehend automatisch auf State- und Activitycharts abgebildet werden. Auf der Ebene der Verifikation kritischer Workflow-Eigenschaften eroffnen Statecharts die Anwendung der effizienten Methode des Modellprufens. Auf der Ausfuhrungsebene schlieslich konnen aus einer Spezifikation verteilt ausfuhrbare Komponenten generiert werden. Im Rahmen des MENTOR-Projekts wurde eine alle drei Ebenen umfassende Umgebung fur die Spezifikation, Verifikation und verteilte Ausfuhrung von Workflows realisiert.

Dirk Wodtke

Papers

From Centralized Workflow Specification to Distributed WorkflowExecution

A Formal Foundation for Distributed Workflow Execution Based on State Charts

Enterprise-wide workflow management based on state and activity charts

The MENTOR workbench for enterprise-wide workflow management

Spezifikation, Verifikation und verteilte Ausführung von Workflows in MENTOR