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.

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used to support various types of business processes for more than a decade now. In workflows for e-commerce and Web-services applications, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying Quality of Service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of services. The management of QoS metrics directly impacts the success of organizations participating in e-commerce. Therefore, when services or products are created or managed using workflows, the underlying workflow system must accept the specifications and be able to estimate, monitor, and control the QoS rendered to customers. In this paper, we present a predictive QoS model that makes it possible to compute the quality of service for workflows automatically based on atomic task QoS attributes. To this end, we present a model that specifies QoS and describe an algorithm and a simulation system in order to compute, analyze and monitor workflow QoS metrics. 1

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...

Workflow management systems (WFMSs) more and more become the basic technology for organizations to perform their daily business processes (workflows). A consistent and reliable execution of such processes is crucial for all organizations. We claim that this can only be achieved by integrating transactional features - especially "workflow transactions " - into WFMSs. Based on this idea, we discuss in detail advanced workflow recovery concepts which are necessary for the reliable and consistent execution of business processes in the presence of failures and exceptions. Additionally, we distinguish between different workflow types and present adequate recovery concepts for each of them. 1.

Healthcare enterprises involve complex processes that span diverse groups and organisations. These processes involve clinical and administrative tasks, large volumes of data, and large numbers of patients and personnel. The tasks can be performed either by humans or by automated systems. In the latter case, the tasks are supported by a variety of software applications and information systems which are very often heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed. The development of systems to manage and automate these processes has increasingly played an important role in improving the efficiency of healthcare enterprises. In this paper we look at four healthcare and medical applications that involve investigative, clinical, and administrative functions. Based on these applications, we derive the requirements for developing enterprise applications that involve the coordination of a variety of tasks performed by humans, information systems, and legacy applications.

Workflow management is emerging as a challenging area for databases, stressing database technology beyond its current capabilities. Workflow management systems need to be more integrated with data management technology, in particular as it concerns the access to external databases and as a support technology for workflow management, to support intelligent exception handling and transaction management. Thus, a convergence between workflow management and databases is occurring. In order to make such convergence effective, however, it is required to improve and strengthen the specification of workflows at the conceptual level, by formalizing within a unique model their "internal behavior" (e.g., interaction and cooperation between tasks), their relationship to the environment (e.g., assignment of work task to agents) and the access to external databases. In the WIDE (Workflow on Intelligent and Distributed database Environment) project 1 , a rich conceptual model is proposed, including ...

Advanced database applications like office automation, CAD/CAM and Software Engineering are characterized by the presence of long-duration, cooperative or multidatabase tasks. These applications can be data-centric or process-centric or both. Extended transaction models designed to address the requirements of these applications use a data-centric approach and they do not have adequate implementation support. On the other hand, workflow management as promoted by industry uses a process-centric approach. However, due to lack of concrete guidelines, they contain customized features for modeling and executing applications. While they certainly have many practical features that extended transaction models do not provide, they do not have adequate support to satisfy the modeling & correctness requirements of advanced applications. To date, no systematic studies have been undertaken to design proper support for these applications. This paper attempts to fill the lacuna by unifying the workflo...

By incorporating aspects of coordination and collaboration, workflow implementations of information systems require a sound conceptualisation of business processing semantics. Traditionally, the success of conceptual modelling techniques has depended largely on the adequacy of conceptualisation, expressive power, comprehensibility and formal foundation. An equally important requirement, particularly with the increased conceptualisation of business aspects, is business suitability. In this paper, the focus is on the business suitability of workflow modelling for a commonly encountered class of (operational) business processing, e.g. those of insurance claims, bank loans and land conveyancing. A general assessment is first conducted on some integrated techniques characterising well-known paradigms - structured process modelling, object-oriented modelling, behavioural process modelling and business-oriented modelling. Through this, an insight into business suitability within the broader...

operation C 1995, Amit P. Sheth LSDIS 2 Overview . What's workflow? Origin, Advantages, and Example Applications . Review of Commercial State-of-the-Art, Markets and Related Technologies . Basic concepts and specification of workflows . Components of a Workflow Management System . Research: past and in progress . Trends SIGMOD95 Multidatabase Interoperation C 1995, Amit P. Sheth LSDIS 3 Origins of Workflow Ten years ago, a team of engineers conceived the idea that computer software could be used to automate paper-driven business processes. They called it "workflow software." [Smith 93] imaging document flow enhanced emails workgroup support multi-system apps. SIGMOD95 Multidatabase Interoperation C 1995, Amit P. Sheth LSDIS 4 Definition of Workflow (Management) (some samples) "Workflow refers to a new set of software and tools for automating and improving bu

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