D. Hollinsworth. The Workflow Reference Model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1994.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....technology and know how required to implement commercial systems have been available. In general, workflow management systems (WFMS) are used to coordinate and streamline business processes. These business processes are represented as workflows, i.e. computerized models of the business process [11], which specify the individual activity steps, the order and the conditions in which the activities must be executed, the flow of data between activities, the users responsible for the execution of the activities, the tools to use with each activity, etc. A WFMS is the set of tools that allow the ....

....for the execution of the activities, the tools to use with each activity, etc. A WFMS is the set of tools that allow the design and definition of workflows, their instantiation and controlled execution, and the coordination and integration of heterogeneous applications within the same workflow [11]. Users interact with the WFMS by accessing their individual worklists, where they can find the activities for which they are responsible without necessarily being aware of the higher level process to which the activities belong. A crucial point to understand workflow management systems is their ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

D. Hollinsworth, The Workflow Reference Model, Workflow Management Coalition, TC00-1003, December 1994.

....is becoming more common with the recent advances in networking technologies and the growing popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Workflow management is an emerging technology that is concerned with modeling and executing business processes. As defined in the workflow coalition model [15], a business process is a procedure where documents, information or tasks are passed between participants according to defined sets of rules to achieve, or contribute to, an overall business goal . A WorkFlow Management System (WFMS) thus provides a formalism (e.g. Petri nets, task graphs) in ....

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition. http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

....and sophisticated marketing of new products and services. A holistic approach towards providing mobile staff with the appropriate infrastructure and device support focuses on understanding the interactions between business processes and any workflow management systems supporting these processes [2], software systems, networking [3, 4] and task appropriate hardware devices, Figure1. Further, the issues of security, data synchronization, network reliability, and everevolving business processes further complicate the deployment and maintenance of a successful mobile operations support ....

# D. Hollinsworth, The Workflow Reference Model, Workflow Management Coalition, TC00-1003, December 1994. http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC;

....management the backbone of the information processing technology of the enterprise. 2 Current Products To understand workflow management systems, it is important to understand their origins. These can be traced back to office automation, image processing or computer supported cooperative work [Hol94] all environments in which the emphasis was on issues such as routing, sharing and cooperation. Performance, scalability or reliability are hardly ever considered by this type of systems [KAGM96] and these characteristics have been inherited by workflow products. The robustness and technological ....

....are some of their most important limitations: ffl Interoperability: existing systems are almost totally incompatible. The situation is similar to that of databases before the widespread acceptance of the relational model. In spite of efforts like those of the Workflow Management Coalition [Hol94] current products incorporate in the design very concrete and exclusive interpretations of the world (ActionWorkflow being the best example) making practically impossible to federate different systems. These incompatibilities are not just the syntax or the platform, but the very interpretation ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1994. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

....products [6] whose goals, however, are very different from ours and include cooperative work, task routing, and data sharing in business environments. Probably reacting to the predominant lack of commercial attention to issues like scalability, reliability, concurrency control, and recovery [7], most research efforts have focused on interoperability, transaction management and high availability for business workflows, none of which is again among our interests. Characteristic is the fact that interoperability is the main goal of the Workflow Management Coalition [7] a standardization ....

....control, and recovery [7] most research efforts have focused on interoperability, transaction management and high availability for business workflows, none of which is again among our interests. Characteristic is the fact that interoperability is the main goal of the Workflow Management Coalition [7], a standardization bureau that provides a generic reference model for workflows. In general, existing commercial and research systems offer most of the functionality outlined in Section 3. There are two critical capabilities, however, that are missing from these systems (with few exceptions) ....

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, Avenue Marcel Thiry 204, 1200 Brussels, Belgium, December 1994.

....linked by a network. From a research point of view, such clusters are interesting as platforms for implementing truly distributed systems. From a practical standpoint, the problem is how to build something coherent out of systems that were not necessarily designed to work together [COR95a, Hol96, BN97] existing products tend to be unsatisfactory because they are, in most cases, only partial solutions to a fairly general problem. For instance, CORBA [COR95a] needs the transactional services a TP monitor provides [BN97, Obe94] a TP monitor could greatly benefit from the standard ....

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1996. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

....to manage and support business processes are an active research area. RW92] DS93] GHS95] LA92] MAGK95] In particular, a significant amount of research has been done in the area of modeling and supporting the execution of business processes. The model generally used is the workflow model [Hol94] Workflow systems assume that a process can be divided in small, unitary actions, called activities. To perform the process, one must perform the set (or perhaps a subset) of the activities that comprise it. In addition, there may be dependencies between different activities. The main ....

D. Hollinsworth. Workflow reference model. Technical report, Workflow Management Coalition, TC00-1003, December 1994.

....art has so far been determined by commercial products. Hence, to understand the state of the art, it is important to understand where workflow comes from. The origins of commercial workflow systems can be traced back to office automation, image processing or computer supported cooperative work [Hol94] The emphasis in these environments has been routing, sharing and cooperation. Issues such as performance, scalability or reliability are hardly ever considered by this type of systems [KAGM96] and these characteristics have been inherited by workflow products. There are no commercial workflow ....

....are some of their most important limitations: ffl Interoperability: existing systems are almost totally incompatible. The situation is similar to that of databases before the widespread acceptance of the relational model. In spite of efforts like those of the Workflow Management Coalition [Hol94] current products incorporate in the design very concrete and exclusive interpretations of the world (ActionWorkflow being the best example) making practically impossible to federate different systems. These incompatibilities are not just the syntax or the platform, but the very interpretation ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1994. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

....is becoming more common with the recent advances in networking technologies and the growing popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Workflow management is an emerging technology that is concerned with modeling and executing business processes. As defined in the workflow coalition model [17], a business process is a procedure where documents, information or tasks are passed between participants according to defined sets of rules to achieve, or contribute to, an overall business goal . A WorkFlow Management System (WFMS) thus provides a formalism (e.g. Petri nets, taskgraphs) in ....

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition. http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

....systems. 2 Large Scale Workflow Systems The basic concepts of workflow management can be best introduced using the definitions provided by the Reference Model of the Workflow Management Coalition, WfMC, an international organization leading the efforts to standardize workflow management products [wfmcM]. Concrete architectural details are based on FlowMark, IBM s workflow product. 2.1 Types of Workflow Systems There are many parameters involved in the specification of a workflow system. In spite of the efforts of the Workflow Management Coalition, the term workflow is still very fuzzy and used ....

....Model The core of any workflow system is formed by business processes. The reference model defines a business process as a procedure where documents, information or tasks are passed between participants according to defined sets of rules to achieve, or contribute to, an overall business goal [wfmcM]. A workflow is a representation of the business process in a machine readable format. Hence, a workflow management system, WFMS, is a system that completely defines, manages and executes workflows through the execution of software whose order of execution is driven by a computer representation ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

D. Hollinsworth. The Workflow Reference Model, Workflow Management Coalition, TC00-1003, December 1994.

....Management Coalition (WfMC) an industry consortium aims at a unified terminology and a standardization of key components of a workflow management system. The WfMC identified a set of six primitives with which it is possible to describe control flow and hence construct a workflow specification [37]. A workflow process is defined as a collection of processing steps (activities) organized to accomplish some business processes. An activity can be performed by one or more software systems or machines (e.g. instruments or robots) by a person or a team, or a combination of these. A workflow ....

....formal and clear definition of a workflow. The solid mathematical and graph theory based foundation of this formalization make it appropriate for developing a correctness theory and a favorable reference model. It should be noted that, the primitives defined by Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) [37] are taken into consideration in our model. In the following, definition of a hyperSet that reflects the groupings of activities is provided. These groupings of activities are called as execution blocks or conceptual activities. When proper control flow edges are imposed on this set, the resulting ....

D. Hollinsworth, The Workflow Reference Model, Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1994. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

....and knowhow required to implement commercial systems have become available. In general, workflow management systems (WFMSs) are used to coordinate and streamline business processes. These business processes are represented as workflows, i.e. computerized models of the business processes [10], which specify the individual activity steps, the order and the conditions in which the activities must be executed, the flow of data between activities, the users responsible for the execution of the activities, the tools to use with each activity, etc. A WFMS is the set of tools that allow the ....

....for the execution of the activities, the tools to use with each activity, etc. A WFMS is the set of tools that allow the design and definition of workflows, their instantiation and controlled execution, and the coordination and integration of heterogeneous applications within the same workflow [10]. Users interact with a WFMS by accessing their individual worklists, where they can find the activities for which they are responsible without necessarily being aware of the higher level process to which the activities belong. A crucial point to understand workflow management systems is their ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

D. Hollinsworth, The Workflow Reference Model, Workflow Management Coalition, TC00-1003, December 1994.

....representations of processes such as OGWL (Opera Graphical Workflow Language) a modeling language for business processes. OGWL is a simple graphical process description language, based on IBM s FDL [LA94] which closely follows the model proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition [Hol96] OGWL specifications are only used for interacting with the user. Internally, OGWL specifications are compiled into OCR (Opera Canonical Representation) which is later translated into the data models of the underlying databases used as Opera repositories. 6.1 Graphical representation in OGWL ....

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC001003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1996. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

....a general framework. This is the model of FlowMark [LA94, LR94] an IBM workflow product designed for managing business processes in distributed and heterogeneous environments. 2. 1 Business Processes A business process coordinates the different steps required to achieve a particular goal [Hol94] Its key elements are thus the steps to execute and how they are coordinated into a meaningful whole. Consider, as an example, the approval of a loan request in a bank. The first step involves getting information from the person requesting the loan. Then, and only after the first step has been ....

D. Hollinsworth. The Workflow Reference Model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1994.

....of these models, will result in major restrictions that will limit its applicability and usefulness as a workflow tool. 3 Workflow Management Systems Workflow is, in general, an ill defined concept. Instead of trying to describe it precisely, we follow the Workflow Management Coalition, WfMC, Hol94] in providing a high level description of the model and functionality that a WFMS must support to be considered as such. When discussing particular implementation details, we use FlowMark [LR94] IBM s workflow product, which will also be briefly discussed. FlowMark follows very closely the ....

....systems. 3.2 Workflow Model A workflow model is an acyclic directed graph in which nodes represent steps of execution and edges represent the flow of control and data among the different steps. The components described below follow the meta model proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition [Hol94] This model is only an abstraction and does not provide implementation details. These are described based on FlowMark s model: Process, a description of the sequence of steps to be completed to accomplish some goal. A process consists of activities and relevant data. Processes can be nested. ....

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1994. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

....to manage and support business processes are an active research area. RW92] DS93] GHS95] LA92] MAGK95] In particular, a significant amount of research has been done in the area of modeling and supporting the execution of business processes. The model generally used is the workflow model [Hol94] Workflow systems assume that a process can be divided in small, unitary actions, called activities. To perform the process, one must perform the set (or perhaps a subset) of the activities that comprise it. In addition, there may be dependencies between different activities. The main approach ....

D. Hollinsworth. Workflow reference model. Technical report, Workflow Management Coalition, TC00-1003, December 1994.

....and knowhow required to implement commercial systems have become available. In general, workflow management systems (WFMSs) are used to coordinate and streamline business processes. These business processes are represented as workflows, i.e. computerized models of the business processes [13], which specify the individual activity steps, the order and the conditions in which the activities must be executed, the flow of data between activities, the users responsible for the execution of the activities, the tools to use with each activity, etc. A WFMS is the set of tools that allow the ....

....for the execution of the activities, the tools to use with each activity, etc. A WFMS is the set of tools that allow the design and definition of workflows, their instantiation and controlled execution, and the coordination and integration of heterogeneous applications within the same workflow [13]. Users interact with a WFMS by accessing their individual worklists, where they can find the activities for which they are responsible without necessarily being aware of the higher level processes to which the activities belong. A crucial point to understand workflow management systems is their ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

D. Hollinsworth, The Workflow Reference Model, Workflow Management Coalition, TC00-1003, December 1994. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/

....they allow a controlled relaxation of the ACID properties of Transactions. Essentially, the TWFs dealt with in this paper allow a user defined notion of failure atomicity and our future work will allow a user defined notion of execution atomicity. TWFs should be distinguished from workflows [7] and commercial workflow products such as LinkWorks [10] since the latter do not provide any Transactional behaviour. Also, the activities managed by commercial workflow products tend to be human oriented, such as creating and updating documents. The workflow product simply provides a mechanism to ....

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1994. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

.... a modeling language for business processes based on IBM s FDL [13] which also follows the Activity5 Activity4 Activity2 Activity3 Activity1 Process2 R 100 R 100 true true true true Activity Subprocess Block Control Connector Figure 4: Control flow description Workflow Management Coalition Model [10]. Internally, OGWL specifications are compiled into OCR (Opera Canonical Representation) a rule based language which is later translated into the data models of the underlying databases used as Opera repositories. While the incorporation of exception handling into a text based language like OCR ....

D. Hollinsworth. The workflow reference model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1996. Accessible via: http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/WfMC/.

No context found.

D. Hollinsworth. The Workflow Reference Model. Technical Report TC00-1003, Workflow Management Coalition, December 1994.

Online articles have much greater impact   More about CiteSeer.IST   Add search form to your site   Submit documents   Feedback  

CiteSeer.IST - Copyright Penn State and NEC