Workflow

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

The action workflow approach to workflow management technology

Abstract: This paper describes the ActionWorkflow™ approach to workflow management technology: a design methodology and associated computer software for the support of work in organizations. The approach is based on theories of communicative activity as language/action, developed in a series of systems for coordination among users of networked computers. This article describes the approach, gives an example of its application, and shows the architecture of a workflow management system based on it.

Specification and implementation of exceptions in workflow management systems

Abstract: Although workflow management systems are most applicable when an organization follows standard business processes and routines, any of these processes faces the need for handling exceptions, i.e., asynchronous and anomalous situations that fall outside the normal control flow.In this paper we concentrate upon anomalous situtations that, although unusual, are part of the semantics of workflow applications, and should be specified and monitored coherently; in most real-life applications, such exceptions affect a significant fraction of workflow cases. However, very few workflow management systems are integrated with a highly expressive language for specifying this kind of exception and with a system component capable of handling it. We present Chimera-Exc, a language for the specification of exceptions for workflows based on detached active rules, and then describe the architecture of a system, called FAR, that implements Chimera-Exc and integrates it with a commercial workflow management system and database server. We discuss the main issues that were solved by our implementation, and report on the performance of FAR. We also discuss design criteria for exceptions in light of the formal properties of their execution. Finally, we focus on the portability of FAR on its unbundling to a generic architecture with detached active rules.

Workflow management and control system

Abstract: Methods and apparatus for defining, executing, monitoring and controlling the flow of business operations A designer first defines a workflow by providing a template of business activities that expresses the manner in which these activities relate to one another The system orchestrates performance of the tasks in accordance with the template; in so doing, it integrates various types of application software, and partitions tasks among various users and computers

QoS-aware replanning of composite Web services

Abstract: Run-time service discovery and late-binding constitute some of the most challenging issues of service-oriented software engineering. For late-binding to be effective in the case of composite services, a QoS-aware composition mechanism is needed. This means determining the set of services that, once composed, not only will perform the required functionality, but also will best contribute to achieve the level of QoS promised in service level agreements (SLAs). However, QoS-aware composition relies on estimated QoS values and workflow execution paths previously obtained using a monitoring mechanism. At run-time, the actual QoS values may deviate from the estimations, or the execution path may not be the one foreseen. These changes could increase the risk of breaking SLAs and obtaining a poor QoS. Such a risk could be avoided by replanning the service bindings of the workflow slice still to be executed. This paper proposes an approach to trigger and perform composite service replanning during execution. An evaluation has been performed simulating execution and replanning on a set of composite service workflows.