Workflow management

Vol. 1096 T. Schal, Workflow Management Systems for Process Organisations. XII, 200 pages. 1996. 

The term business process became a buzzword in the last decade of the past century, but even today there is no widely accepted definition. The term is used in particular by the business process reengineering and workflow management communities. 

Two XML-based integration tools have been built in the area of process management. The first translates AHEAD (cf. Sect. 3.4) process definitions into the petri net dialect used as workflow language by the commercial workflow management tool COSA [615]. The second handles the import of workflow definitions made with WOMS (cf. Sect. 2.4) into AHEAD. Both made use of the XML transformation language XSLT [602]. 

We have developed an approach to integrate workflow processes into the overall design process and have realized a coupling of workflow management systems with AHEAD for use within an organization. Our approach is characterized by the following properties ... 

In order to reduce the effort for the integration of multiple workflow management systems, we make use of the neutral exchange format XDPL from the Workflow Management Coalition [1059]. The transformation between... 

There are several alternatives for the mapping of predefined partial workflow processes into dynamic task nets. On the one hand, the whole workflow process can be represented as a single task in the dynamic task net. Its activation reflects the start of the workflow instance within the workflow management system, while the termination of this task reflects the termination of the work-flow instance. In this case, the fine-grained activity structure of the workflow process is hidden black-box approach). This simple form of integration is sufficient in many situations, but because of the encapsulation it is impossible to monitor the progress of the activities in the workflow process within AHEAD. 

The AHEAD system and the workflow management system SHARK from... 

Workflow Instantiation. AHEAD automatically contacts the workflow management system and requests the creation of an instance of the corresponding workflow process deflnition. A new instance of the workflow deflnition is created and a reference to the instance is handed back to AHEAD (5). After all defined input data is transferred and provided as actual parameters to the workflow instance, the workflow is Anally started. 

Process Traceability. After the termination of the last workflow activity, the workflow instance is terminated in the workflow management system automatically. In AHEAD, the workflow fragment is still visible with all terminated workflow tasks of this fragment. All documents produced during the course of the workflow remain accessible in AHEAD. This allows for traceability of the overall process regardless if a part has been executed in AHEAD or in a workflow management system. 

The realization of the view-based cooperation model has required a number of extensions to this coupling mechanism with respect to the coupling of AHEAD systems and workflow management systems [129, 471]. Mainly, the application logic of AHEAD was substantively changed and extended in order to realize the new view-based concepts for process views, cooperation relationships, flexible configuration support, as well as the needed user interfaces for a view editor environment. 

AHEAD project management systems workflow management systems product management systems... 

Some of these aspects are investigated in literature-. The work of [1012] primarily focuses on case transfer and an extended variant thereof. In [1013], the same author discusses loosely coupled processes. The interaction paradigms process chaining and subcontracting are supported by the standards defined by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC [803]). In addition, subcontracting was introduced as early as 1987 by the Istar system [641] into the software engineering domain. 

Furthermore, the model contains the required process knowledge in case some workflow management system should be installed for supporting repetitive sub-processes of the overall design process. An efficient usage of these systems is often impeded by insufficient and imprecise definitions of the work-flows to be supported. 

Independent of VDT, Steidel [426] developed a further detailed actor-oriented simulation model for product development processes at Berlin University of Technology. This model also ignored the particularities of process engineering. Likewise, the participative creation of the simulation model or the optimization of workflow management were also not supported by the methodology. Additionally, bottlenecks caused by the insufficient availability of resources could not be represented. In chemical process design, such bottlenecks can be caused by the restricted capacities of laboratories, for example. 

In the next step, additional aspects of the work process are added to the model or described in a more precise way (2). Both the choice of aspects and the degree of detail depend on the intended applications of the work process model. For example, if a design process model is supposed to guide an inexperienced designer, behavioral aspects of the design process (such as the sequence of activities to be performed and conditions for their execution) can be expressed in natural language. In contrast, if the work process model is intended, for example, as input specification for a workflow management system, a formal and detailed description of behavioral aspects is required. 

In a final step, a simulation model, implemented as a Petri net, was created according to the transformation rules described Subsect. 5.2.4. This model allows experts to assess workflow management variants in a simulation-based way. 

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