Authors:
Shazia Sadiq
1
;
Maria Orlowska
1
;
Joe Lin
2
and
Wasim Sadiq
2
Affiliations:
1
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Australia
;
2
SAP Research Centre, Australia
Keyword(s):
Flexible Workflows, Workflow Modelling, Process Constraints
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Business Process Management
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Engineering
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Management and Information Sharing
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Modeling Concepts and Information Integration Tools
;
Modeling Formalisms, Languages and Notations
;
Modeling of Distributed Systems
;
Requirements Analysis And Management
;
Symbolic Systems
Abstract:
Workflow technology has delivered effectively for a large class of business processes, providing the requisite control and monitoring functions. At the same time, this technology has been the target of much criticism due to its limited ability to cope with dynamically changing business conditions which require business processes to be adapted frequently, and/or its limited ability to model business processes which cannot be entirely predefined. Requirements indicate the need for generic solutions where a balance between process control and flexibility may be achieved. In this paper we present a framework that allows the workflow to execute on the basis of a partially specified model where the full specification of the model is made at runtime, and may be unique to each instance. This framework is based on the notion of process constraints. Where as process constraints may be specified for any aspect of the workflow, such as structural, temporal, etc. our focus in this paper is on a c
onstraint which allows dynamic selection of activities for inclusion in a given instance. We call these cardinality constraints, and this paper will discuss their specification and validation requirements.
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