Alonso, G., D. Agrawal, A. Abbadi, and C. Mohan (1996), "Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems," IEEE Expert Journal.  Home/Search   Document Details and Download   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....criteria for accepting or rejecting the claim could be precisely defined. The tools used to process the claims should thus enforce and support the employees in meeting the actual claim handling definitions. Such kind of support is requested by and researched in the workflow community (cf. e.g. [23]) In the case of more creative tasks such as design activities, a complete and strict definition of the task is not possible. But also in creative processes certain sub tasks must be performed in pre defined situations, and or the performance of some sub tasks can be restricted by some ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. Abbadi and C. Mohan, Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Managment Systems, IEEE Expert, 1996

....fast and flexible way to guarantee a short time to market while allowing a dynamic reaction to new customer demands and changing offers of service providers in electronic commerce environments. Information technology has provided different tools to address these requirements. The workflow concept [10, 3, 8, 5] has been very successful in coordinating and streamlining business processes but is so far limited to a single This work was partially done in the context of the ESPRIT IV project CROSSFLOW. Members of the CROSSFLOW consortium are AGF Irish Life Holdings (Ireland) GMD IPSI (Germany) ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. E. Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems. IEEE Expert Journal, 12(5), 1996.

....banking transactions, trip planning, catalog ordering and fulfillment processes, and manufacturing processes in an enterprise. A workflow management system (abbr, WfMS ) provides a model and tools for specification, analysis, and execution of workflows. Surveys of the area can be found in [21, 17, 3]. Scheduling of workflows is a problem of finding a correct execution sequence for the workflow tasks, i.e. an execution that obeys the constraints that embody the business logic of the workflow. Research on workflow scheduling has largely concentrated on temporal constraints, which specify ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems. In IEEE-Expert. Special issue on Cooperative Information Systems, 1997.

....(Wfms) have attracted a great deal of attention both in industry and research. The prac tical success of Wfms is derived from the fact that Wfms enable programming in the large, providing support for orga nizational aspects, application integration, monitoring, distribution and heterogeneity [2,21 ]. A workflow is a collection of activities organized to accomplish some business process. When defining a workflow, activities represent what to do and link to the application or business object that implements the functionality. The control and data flow between activities is specified ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. E1Abbadi and C. Mohan. Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems. IEEE Expert 1997.

....for applications to work with more than one workflow system. For example, Ultimus provides seven interfaces [125] Workflow Objects API, Flobot API, Forms Control API, Security API, Launch Process Specifications, Server side DLL and Database Specifications. According to Alonso and colleagues [2], this number is in the order of several hundreds in the case of InConcert. Therefore, an application that supports several workflow products would have to implement an unreasonable number of APIs. Weske and colleagues [132] have studied the problems associated with hooking up applications to a ....

....each followup case comprises the entire process and executes in a centralized manner. Many researchers have identified the centralized model typical of current workflow architectures as one of their limitations. For example, in their analysis of contemporary workflow systems, Alonso and colleagues [2] conclude: An architecture based on a centralized server is vulnerable to server failures and offers limited scalability due to the potential performance bottlenecks caused by centralized servers. Besides technical problems, the previous solutions also have administrative problems. Centralized ....

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G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of current work- flow management systems, 1997. Available on the Web at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/ exotica/wfmsys.ps.

....the business in the short and long term 4. identify individuals who have specific skills, and 5. allocate staff with appropriate skills to projects efficiently and effectively. AIAI has been working on ontologies and in particular capability ontologies in the context of workflow systems [2]. The two related projects are Enterprise [3,4,5] and TBPM [6] We are now now at International Teledemocracy Centre, Napier University, Edinburgh, EH10 5DT, Scotland applying knowledge engineering techniques to make additional use of the capability ontologies in knowledge management. In the ....

Alonso G, Agrawal D, El Abbadi A, and Mohan C. Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems. IEEE-Expert, 1997.

.... as the architectural style of choice for loosely coupled systems [2] The execution engine uses ECA rules as provided by active database 2 management systems (ADBMS) for workflow enactment; unlike other approaches it does not use a centralized ADBMS, which make shortcomings of current WFMS [1] with respect to distribution, openness, and scalability hard to overcome. Note finally that events and ECA rules are considered as a feasible paradigm for integrating WS components and workflow enactment, but that they are not considered as practical for workflow specification. A high level ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, C. Mohan. Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems. IEEE-Expert, 1997.

....measurement. 1 Introduction Workflow management systems (WFMS) completely define, manage and execute workflows (computerised automation of a business process, in whole or part) through the execution of software whose order of execution is driven by a computer representation of the workflow logic [1], 15] 13] WFMSs carry out business processes by interpreting the process definition. The major advantage of WFMSs is the separation between process logic and task logic, whereby the latter is embedded in individual user applications [12] This separation allows the two to be independently ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi and C. Mohan. Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems. IEEE Expert, 1(9), Special Issue on Cooperative Information Systems, 1997.

....and supporting human workers. Therefore this application requires a workflow system that supports manual intervention, persistence, and worklists. Although various studies have identified the absence of support for manual intervention as one of the shortcomings of current workflow systems [1], only few of them have this feature. The Strep Throat Treatment Process can be implemented with a workflow system only if this supports manual intervention. However, a solution built with a traditional workflow architecture doesn t let developers to pick and choose the workflow features this ....

....to manually moving the flow of control from one node of the activity map to another. Several studies identify the support for manual intervention as one of the important requirements of workflow systems. Despite their findings, currently only few commercial systems provide this feature [1]. The manual intervention component provides the mechanism for stopping, rewinding, and resuming running workflows. In effect, it lets workflow execution jump to any point within the process history therefore it depends on the history component described at the beginning of Section 4. Instances ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems, 1997. Available on the Web at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/exotica/wfmsys.ps. 11

.... [5,6] This is a desirable situation for the future, however, at the current state of technology, workflow management systems that rely exclusively on a business object environment face challenges that hinder their application, such as performance problems for enterprise wide application [7] or the difficulty to efficiently retrieve status information from distributed objects for monitoring and controlling purposes [8] While these problems are likely to be solved in the long run, new workflow management systems have to fit into the existing enterprise information systems ....

Alonso, G.; Agrawal, D.; El Abbadi, A.; Mohan, C.: Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems, IEEE Expert, Vol. 12, No. 5, 1997.

....need to cooperate in the context of at least some business processes, and thus the various heterogeneous WFMS must be integrated into a federated inter enterprise or enterprise wide WFMS. Nevertheless, in the current state of the art, this kind of interoperability is not yet possible to achieve [1, 19]. The problem of achieving WFMS interoperability is similar to that of the integration of heterogeneous database systems into a database federation [14] since both aim at integrating heterogeneous local component systems into one global system. Just like component database 2 systems in a ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abadi, C. Mohan. Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems. IEEE Expert, 1996

....projects with small loads. As such, they are unsuitable for large scale workflow management (e.g. Telecom deployments) which may potentially involve several thousand users, hundreds of thousands of concurrently running processes and several thousand sites distributed over wide area networks [11]. Research projects, however, have confronted many of these issues. Many current research projects are drawing from methodologies and technologies such as object oriented design, the World Wide Web, CORBA, transaction processing, Java and others in order to help solve some of the problems ....

G Alonso et al, "Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems", IEEE Expert, Vol 12, No. 5, Spet/Oct 1997

....for the management of administrative processes characterized by clear, well defined structure, and constant, predictable form for some time. However, there is a consensus that current systems are insufficiently flexible to deal with complex, dynamic processes within a changing context (see Alonso et al., 1997, Sheth, 1997) One approach to increasing the flexibility of workflow systems is to use knowledge based techniques to represent the context in which a process is occurring to the system, and thus enable the system to use such knowledge to reason about the process, and to adapt to a changing ....

Alonso, G., Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A., and Mohan, C., 1997. Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems.

....has been during years the definition and development of WFMS including models, modeling languages, execution environments, etc. this effort has reached a reasonable success, with a number of both research prototypes and commercial systems currently available (a number of them are described in [3]) However, from our point of view, a strong foundation about WF development is still to come. As pointed out in [4] methodological issues have received little attention, and WF developers often have to face the problem of WF development with neither a methodological support nor a global view of ....

Alonso, G., et al., Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems. IEEE Expert 12(5): 0- (1997).

....were designed for small collaborative projects with small loads. As such, they are unsuitable for large scale workflow management, potentially involving several thousand users, hundreds of thousands of concurrently running processes and several thousand sites distributed over wide area networks [13]. Research projects, however, have confronted many of these issues. Many current research projects are drawing from technologies such as objects, the World Wide Web, CORBA, transaction processing, Java and others in order to help solve some of the problems mentioned above. CORBA and Workflow, ....

G Alonso, D Agrawal, A El Abbadi, C Mohan, "Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems", IEEE Expert, Vol 12, No. 5, Spet/Oct 1997

....with a new place r such that j ffl pj = j ffl rj and jq ffl j = jr ffl j. 5 An Agent Based Workflow Management Model Workflow systems are designed to automate complex activities consisting of many dependent tasks. Workflow management systems, WFMS, are widely used to automate business processes [1], and there is growing interest in their application to data intensive scientific and engineering problems [18] There is ample evidence that the business use of workflows increases productivity and improves the quality of the products of an organization and we should expect similar benefits for ....

....availability and scalability features of the underlying database system. However, in practice workflow systems require advanced transaction models not supported by most commercial DBMS. Consequently, an Workflow Management System built on top of the DBMS does not exhibit desired properties [1]. Moreover, many of the tasks that a workflow system might be used to automate are non transactional in nature (e.g. interaction with humans, integration of applications that do not provide transactional semantics support) which further limits the benefits of basing a workflow management system ....

G. Alonzo, D. Agrawal, A. El-Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems. Technical report, IBM Almaden Research Center, 1997.

....connections between the server and the client once to fire off the subworkflow, and once to transfer back its results. This characteristic has several consequences. First, it enables disconnected workflow execution, an important feature that is missing from many current workflow systems [1, 12, 13, 10]. For example, the subworkflow can run on a laptop computer which is removed from the network once the subworkflow starts execution. Second, as Hagen observes in his PhD thesis [5] this type of architecture facilitates maintenance tasks. While the subworkflow executes on the client, workflow ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. E. Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems, 1997. Available on the Web at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/exotica/wfmsys.ps.

....functions. However, sometimes the workflow rules may need to be overridden. Moreover, there are circumstances when a job s definition is completed while the job is executing. This situation corresponds to ad hoc workflows. These are useful when dealing with exceptions or unique situations [AAAM97] In such circumstances, humans take over task ordering and coordination [GHS95] Consequently, a WfMS that supports ad hoc workflows has different requirements. The focus is on functionality for facilitating human coordination, collaboration and co decision. These requirements illustrate the ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems, 1997. Available on the Web at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/exotica/ wfmsys.ps.

....shows that the community is aware of the difficulties and is seeking solutions. According to [Moh98] only a few commercial systems allow their users to modify executing workflows, e.g. InConcert and TeamWARE Flow. The typical workflow system architecture consists of three components [Hol95, AAAM97, Sch96] Build time functions provide support for process definition and modeling. Run time control manage process execution and their associated resources. Finally, run time interaction functions provide the interfaces to human users and IT application tools. Usually, a workflow engine ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems, 1997. Available on the Web at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/exotica/ wfmsys.ps.

.... [Ora95, Moi95, Inf96] Token Based Replication [AE95] Atomicity Consensus and 2PC [FLP85, BHG87] ACL97, GHR97] Practical Applications of 2PC class notes [LEK97] Transactions and Distributed Transactions class notes TP Monitors TP Monitors class notes [BN97] Workflow WFMS class notes [GHS95, AAEM97] Ordering and Causality, Checkpointing [Lam78, CL85] Logging Recovery Principles [Jef85] Parallelism Parallel Databases class notes Parallel Databases class notes Review ....

G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems. IEEE Expert, 12(5), September-October 1997.

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Alonso, G., D. Agrawal, A. Abbadi, and C. Mohan (1996), "Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems," IEEE Expert Journal.

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G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and Limitations of Current Workflow Management Systems. To appear in IEEE-Expert, special issue on Cooperative Information Systems, 1997

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G. Alonso, D. Agrawal, A. El Abbadi, and C. Mohan. Functionality and limitations of currentworkflow management systems. IEEE Expert Journal, 12(5), 1996.

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Alonso G., Agrawal D., Abbadi E., Mohan C. (1995), "Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems".

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Alonso G., Agrawal D., Abbadi E., Mohan C., Functionality and limitations of current workflow management systems, 1995.

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