Today’s business enterprises must deal with global competition, reduce the cost of doing business, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize the way they do business and change their information systems and applications to support evolving business processes. Workflow technology facilitates these by providing methodologies and software to support (i) business process modeling to capture business processes as workflow specifications, (ii) business process reengineering to optimize specified processes, and (iii) workflow automation to generate workflow implementations from workflow specifications. This paper provides a high-level overview of the current workflow management methodologies and software products. In addition, we discuss the infrastructure technologies that can address the limitations of current commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and mission of workflow management systems to support increased workflow automation in complex real-world environments involving heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed information systems. In particular, we discuss how distributed object management and customized transaction management can support further advances in the commercial state of the art in this area.

In the past few years there has been an increasing interest in workflow applications as a way of supporting complex business processes in modern corporations. Given the nature of the environment and the technology involved, workflow applications are inherently distributed and pose many interesting challenges to the system designer. In most cases, a client/server architecture is used in which knowledge about the processes being executed is centralized in one node to facilitate monitoring, auditing, and to simplify synchronization. In this paper, we explore a novel distributed architecture, Exotica/FMQM, for workflow systems in which the need for such a centralized database is eliminated. Instead, we use persistent messages as the means to store the information relevant to the execution of a business process. Our approach is to completely distribute the execution of a process so individual nodes are independent. The advantages of this approach are increased resilience to failures and gre...

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale, organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualisation, design and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our sys...

. Workflows represent processes in manufacturing and office environments that typically consist of several well-defined activities (known as tasks). To ensure that these tasks are executed by authorized users or processes (subjects), proper authorization mechanisms must be in place. Moreover, to make sure that authorized subjects gain access on the required objects only during the execution of the specific task, granting and revoking of privileges need to be synchronized with the progression of the workflow. A predefined specification of the privileges often allows access for more than the time required, thus, though a subject completes the task or have not yet begun the task, it may still possess privileges to access the objects, resulting in compromising security. In this paper, we propose a Workflow Authorization Model (WAM) that is capable of specifying authorizations in such a way that subjects gain access to required objects only during the execution of the task, thu...

Workflow management systems have attracted a great deal of attention due to their ability to integrate heterogeneous, distributed applications into coherent business processing environments. In spite of their limitations, existing products are enjoying considerable success since they are the first practical implementation of functionality and concepts studied for many years. The goals may have changed from office automation and computer supported cooperative work to business processes and re-engineering, but the basic ideas and concepts have remained the same. It would be a mistake, however, not to try to see beyond current systems and applications. In today's computer environments, the trend towards using many small computers instead of a few big ones has revived the old dream of distributed computing. But there is a significant lack of tools for implementing, operating and maintaining such systems. Most existing solutions still belong to the mainframe world and are only slowly making...

Workflow management systems (WFMS) support the modeling and coordinated execution of processes within an organization. As advances in workflow management take place, they are also required to support security. This paper makes two major contributions to the area of workflow management. First, it shows how both mandatory and discretionary security can be incorporated into WFMS. Second, it provides a formal framework, based on Petri nets (PNs), for modeling workflows. Such a theoretical model is necessary for a standard conceptual representation as well as for analyzing the workflows. This paper first presents a Petri Net based model, called Color Timed Petri Net (CTPN), which is capable of modeling the attributes of both multilevel and discretionary security. With respect to the issue of mandatory security, this paper proposes a multilevel secure workflow transaction model and identifies the task dependencies in a workflow that cannot be enforced in order to meet multilevel security con...

A workflow management system (WFMS) facilitates the coordinated execution of applications (steps) that comprise a business process (workflow) across distributed nodes. State-of-the-art WFMSs do not have adequate support for handling various correctness and failure handling requirements of workflows. Different correctness re- quirements arise due to the dependencies between steps that access shared resources. Failure of steps in a workflow and system failures can cause data inconsistencies if handled improperly. Scalability is also a problem in current WFMSs since they use a centralized workflow control architecture that can easily become a performance bottleneck. In this

: The focus of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) on the process concept puts forth the need for consistent methods and techniques for the capture, representation and performance assessment of business processes. In addition, Information Process Reengineering (IPR), i.e., the analysis of how to use legacy and new information systems to automate and support the reengineered business processes, requires the development of information process models, that are consistent, transparent and coherent with the business process models. Although the object-oriented approach seems to be the most suitable for a common process modelling scheme, it lacks significant attributes that would model the specificities of the business domain. In order to tackle this problem, the present paper develops a coupled modelling framework, that integrates an object-oriented method (Object Modelling Technique, OMT) and a business workflow analysis method (Action Workflow Analysis, AWA). The application of the framework to a banking case-study proves its usefulness and practicality. KEYWORDS: Business process reengineering, information process reengineering, workflow analysis, objectoriented software development

This paper argues that the use of AI planning techniques with existing Workflow Management Systems can improve overall system functionality and help to automate the definition of business processes. It is based on a short study carried out at BT Research Laboratories as part of a larger programme that aims to provide technologies for a new generation of business support systems. An initial overview of an operational system is introduced to discuss about some of the background to the problem and how these problems can be resolved using contingent planners. We describe a simple construction problem to demonstrate the advantages of the approach advocated. INTRODUCTION The success of companies depends not only on matching their products and services to market requirements, but more and more on the processes and methods used to produce them. This is evident in the interest in recent years in techniques such as Business Process Re-engineering [7,19]. Challenges include achievement of: sho...

well understood. The prevailing approach to do this is process modeling. We found, however, that traditional process modeling techniques such as IDEF0 obscure some aspects of human works, such as communication, collaboration, coordination, client-worker relations and client satisfaction and suggest an idealized, problem free view on the engineering works. We find that the communication workflow approach addresses these problems. In the paper we provide the theoretical background of this approach and compare a tool that implements it- Action Workflow- to traditional IDEF0 modeling approach. We found that the observation of the workflow loops between customers and performers provides a good overview of what is going on and enables the study of optimization and paralelisation of the works while at the same time maintaining and improving the quality of the services and client satisfaction. Keywords- process modeling, workflow, coordination workflow, Action Workflow, IDEF, computer integrated construction