Enterprise--wide workflow management where workflows may span multiple organizational units require particular consideration of scalability, heterogeneity, and availability issues. The Mentor project which is introduced in this paper aims to reconcile a rigorous workflow specification method with a distributed middleware architecture as a step towards enterprise--wide solutions. The project uses the formalism of state and activity charts and a commercial tool, Statemate, for workflow specification. A first prototype of Mentor has been built which allows executing specifications in a distributed manner. A major contribution of this paper is the method for transforming a centralized state chart specification into a form that is amenable to a distributed execution and to incorporate the necessary synchronization between different processing entities. Fault tolerance issues are addressed by coupling Mentor with the Tuxedo TP monitor. 1 Introduction The competitiveness of many enterprises...

Information systems technology, computer-supported cooperative work practice, and organizational modeling and planning theories have evolved with only accidental contact to each other. Cooperative information systems is a relatively young research area which tries to systematically investigate the synergies between these research fields, driven by the observation that change management is the central issue facing all three areas today and that all three fields have indeed developed rather similar strategies to cope with change. In this paper, we therefore propose a framework which views cooperative information systems as composed from three interrelated facets, viz. the system facet, the group collaboration facet, and the organizational facet. We present an overview of these facets, emphasizing strategies they have developed over the past few years to accommodate change. We also discuss the propagation of change across the facets, and sketch a basic software architecture intended to support the rapid construction and evolution of cooperative information systems on top of existing organizational and technical legacy. 1.

The concept of rule-based modification developed in the area of algebraic graph transformations and high-level replacement systems has recently shown to be a powerful concept for vertical stucturing of Petri nets. This includes low-level and high-level Petri nets, especially algebraic high-level nets which can be considered as an integration of algebraic specifications and Petri nets. In a large case study rule-based modi cation of algebraic high-level nets has been applied successfully for the requirements analysis of a medical information system. The main new result in this paper extends rule-based modification of algebraic high-level nets such that it preserves safety properties formulated in terms of temporal logic. For software development based on rule-based modi cation of algebraic high-level nets as a vertical development strategy this extension is an important new technique. It is called rule-based re nement. As a running example an important safety property of a medical information system is considered and is shown to be preserved under rule-based refinement.

The paper describes the MIKE (Model-based and Incremental Knowledge Engineering) approach for the development of knowledge-based systems (kbs). It integrates semiformal specification techniques, formal specification techniques, and prototyping into a coherent framework. This allows the domain and task model of a kbs to be described on different formalization levels. All activities in the building process are embedded in a cyclic life cycle model. For the semiformal representation we use a hypermedia-based formalism which serves as a communication basis between expert and knowledge engineer during knowledge acquisition. The semiformal knowledge representation is also the basis for formalization, resulting in a formal and executable model of expertise specified in the Knowledge Acquisition and Representation Language (KARL). Since KARL is executable the model of expertise can be developed and validated by prototyping. A smooth transition from a semiformal to a formal specification and fu...

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Recently the demand on business process modelling (BPM) became apparent in many different communities. To provide a unifying framework we propose an approach to integrate (well known) knowledge engineering techniques into a business process modelling context. We see knowledge based systems as one possibility (among others) to implement (re-engineered) business processes or parts thereof. Our framework is exemplified by integrating the MIKE approach (Model based and Incremental Knowledge Engineering) with ARIS (ARchitecture of Information Systems), a prominent representative of business process modelling. An important aspect of our framework is a proposal for linking business process models with a model of expertise. 1 Introduction Recently the demand on business process modelling (BPM) became apparent in many different communities, such as workflow management [Österle 95], information systems engineering, requirements engineering [Kirikova and Bubenko 94], software engineering and kno...

Flexibility of process support is a key requirement for current and future business applications. A technology which is designed to flexibly support various kinds of processes are workflow management systems. In this paper we present INCOME/WF - a prototype of a workflow management system based on high-level Petri nets as workflow modelling and execution language. Important requirements for INCOME/WF are easily adjustable workflow schemes and support for unstructured or weakly structured activities. Both requirements are not yet sufficiently fulfilled by existing WFMS. 1 Introduction For almost thirty years database supported information systems have been used to implement numerous business application systems. Traditional database supported application systems in industry, business or public administration aim at the support of repetitive, non-creative activities. Recently, there is an increasing demand for systems which support unstructured or weakly structured creative "human-orie...

Cooperative knowledge management refers to the work practice or culture facet of information systems engineering; it plays a key role especially in engineering and consulting domains. However, in comparison to technology-centered and business-process-centered meta modeling approaches (exemplified by UML and ERP), this aspect has received significantly less attention in research and is much less mature in terms of international standardization. We claim that additional interdisciplinary research effort is needed in this direction, and discuss different points of attack, largely in terms of their implications for better metadata management and meta modeling.

In this paper an extension of high-level Petri nets, namely nested relation/transition nets (NR/T-nets), is described. NR/T-nets allow to model distributed processes and related complex structured objects in business applications. This paper focuses on the development of complex NR/T-net models. Due to their complexity highlevel Petri net models are usually not developed in one single step. Therefore two evolutionary development strategies are introduced: on the one hand incremental construction by iteratively evaluating, refining, formalizing and integrating net fragments, on the other hand adaptation of application-specific reference process and object models. 1 Introduction Processes in business applications are collections of activities associated with a particular business function where the activities are related by the involved objects, persons or resources. Process models should include a specification of the following aspects: . activities and their synchronization, . roles...