Workflow

About: Workflow is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 31996 publications have been published within this topic receiving 498339 citations.

Integrated process modeling: an ontological evaluation

Abstract: Process modeling has gained prominence in the information systems modeling area due to its focus on business processes and its usefulness in such business improvement methodologies as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, and Workflow Management. However, process modeling techniques are not without their criticisms [13]. This paper proposes and uses the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) representation model to analyze the five views - process, data, function, organization and output - provided in the Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS) popularized by Scheer [39, 40, 41]. The BWW representation model attempts to provide a theoretical base on which to evaluate and thus contribute to the improvement of information systems modeling techniques. The analysis conducted in this paper prompts some propositions. It confirms that the process view alone is not sufficient to model all the real-world constructs required. Some other symbols or views are needed to overcome these deficiencies. However, even when considering all five views in combination, problems may arise in representing all potentially required business rules, specifying the scope and boundaries of the system under consideration, and employing a top-down approach to analysis and design. Further work from this study will involve the operationalization of these propositions and their empirical testing in the field. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

TQoS: Transactional and QoS-Aware Selection Algorithm for Automatic Web Service Composition

Abstract: Web Services are the most famous implementation of service-oriented architectures that has brought some challenging research issues. One of these is the composition, i.e., the capability to recursively construct a composite Web service as a workflow of other existing Web services, which are developed by different organizations and offer diverse functionalities (e.g., ticket purchase, payment), transactional properties (e.g., compensatable or not), and Quality of Service (QoS) values (e.g., execution price, success rate). The selection of a Web service, for each activity of the workflow, meeting the user's requirements, is still an important challenge. Indeed, the selection of one Web service among a set of them that fulfill some functionalities is a critical task, generally depending on a combined evaluation of QoS. However, the conventional QoS-aware composition approaches do not consider the transactional constraints during the composition process. This paper addresses the issue of selecting and composing Web services not only according to their functional requirements but also to their transactional properties and QoS characteristics. We propose a selection algorithm that satisfies user's preferences, expressed as weights over QoS criteria and as risk levels defining semantically the transactional requirements. Proofs and experimental results are presented.