Workflow management systems represent today a key technological infrastructure for advanced applications which is attracting a growing body of research, mainly focused in developing tools for workflow management, that allow the users both to specify the “static ” aspects, like preconditions, precedences among activities, rules for exception handling, and to control its execution, by scheduling the activities on the available resources. This paper deals with an aspect of workflows which has so far not received much attention even though it is crucial for the forthcoming scenarios of large scale applications on the web: providing facilities for the human system administrator for identifying the choices performed more frequently in the past that had lead to a desired final configuration. In this context, we formalize the problem of discovering the most frequent patterns of executions, i.e., the workflow substructures that have been scheduled more frequently by the system. We attacked the problem by developing two data mining algorithms, on the basis of an intuitive and original graph formalization of a workflow schema and its occurrences. The model is used both to prove some intractability results, that strongly motivate the use of data

Enterprise Modelling (EM) methods are well-recognised for their value in describing complex, informal domains in an organised structure. EM methods are used in practice, particularly during the early stages of software system development, e.g. during the phase of business requirements elicitation. The built model, however, has not always provided direct input to software system development. Despite the provision of adequate training to understand and use EM methods, informality is often seen in enterprise models and presents a major obstacle. This paper focuses on one type of EM methods: business process modelling (BPM) methods. We advocate the use of a BPM language within a three-layer framework. The BPM language merges two main and complimentary business process representations, IDEF3 and PSL, to introduce a Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML) that is designed for simplicity of use and under-pinned by rich formality that may be used directly to support software and workflow system development.

One of the most common frameworks for specifying work#ows is control #ow graph #11# 13# 22#. Although control #ow graphs are capable of depicting local execu# tion dependencies of the tasks in a work#ow# they can# not specify global dependencies and are not very helpful when it comes to reasoning about work#ow properties. Recently# a path constraint theory has been developed for semistructured data #2# 7# 8# 9# 10#. It has proven useful for semantic speci#cation and query optimization in the database context. To overcome the limitations of #ow control graphs# this paper generalizes the path con# straint theory to specify and analyze work#ows. More speci#cally# it proposes a path constraint language and shows that both local and global dependencies# as well as sub#work#ows# can be naturally expressed in the lan# guage. This allows one to reason about work#ows in the traditional logic framework. The paper also establishes the decidability of the consistency and implication prob# lems ass...

This work addresses the problem of workflow requirements specifications considering the realistic assumptions that, it involves experts from different domains (i.e. representatives of different business policies); not all the possible execution scenarios are known beforehand, during the early stage of specification. In particular, since the main purpose of a workflow is to achieve a certain (bussiness) goal, we propose a formalism which enables the users to specify their requirements (and expectations) and test if the information that they have provided is, in a sense, sufficient for the workflow to behave “as desired”, in terms of the goal. Our methodology allows domain experts to express not only their knowledge, but also the “ignorance ” (the semantics allows for unknown values to reflect a realistic situation of agents dealing with incomplete information) and the possibility of occurrence of exceptional situations. As a basis for formalizing the process of requirements specifications, we are using the recent results on reasoning about actions. We propose a high level language AW which enables specifying the effects that activites have on the environment and how they should be coordinated. We also describe our prototype tool for process specification. Strictly speaking, in this work we go “one step”

In this paper we integrate a history-encoding based methodology for checking dynamic database integrity constraints into a situation-calculus based specification of relational database updates. By doing this, we are able to: (1) Answer queries about a whole hypothetical evolution of a database, without having to update the entire database and keep all the information associated to the generated states, (2) State and prove dynamic integrity constraints as static integrity constraints, (3) Transform history dependent preconditions for updates into local preconditions.

Workflow concepts are well suited for scenarios where many distributed entities work collaboratively together to achieve a common goal. Today, workflows are mostly used as computerized model for business processes executed in instances in commercial Workflow Management Systems. However, there are many other application domains where computer-supported cooperative work can be captured and organized by workflows. In this paper, we investigate the task of scheduling workflows in self-organizing wireless networks for disaster scenarios. Most research work in the field of workflow scheduling has been driven by temporal and causality constraints. We present an adaptive scheduling algorithm that finds a suitable execution sequence for workflow activities by additionally considering resource allocation constraints and dynamic topology changes. Our approach utilizes a multi-stage distribution algorithm which we extend with techniques to cope with network dynamics.

Abstract. Enterprise Modelling (EM) methods are well-recognised for their value in describing complex, informal domains in an organised structure. EM methods are used in practice, particularly during the early stages of software system development, e.g. during the phase of business requirements elicitation. The built model, however, has not always provided direct input to software system development. Despite the provision of adequate training to understand and use EM methods, informality is often seen in enterprise models and presents a major obstacle. This paper focuses on one type of EM methods: business process modelling (BPM) methods. We advocate the use of a BPM language within a three-layer framework. The BPM language merges two main and complimentary business process representations, IDEF3 and PSL, to introduce a Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML) that is designed for simplicity of use and under-pinned by rich formality that may be used directly to support