Key limitations of the state-of-art workflow products and research prototypes include the lack of adequate support for functioning in heterogeneous environments that involve humans and automated tasks distributed across enterprises, limited scalability, and the lack of adequate support for dealing with errors and failures in real-world organizational settings. Emergence of network computing based on Web and distributed object management provide an attractive infrastructure to address these issues. Workflow management techniques developed in the METEOR 2 project are intended to reliably support coordination of user and automated tasks in real-world multi-enterprise heterogeneous computing environments. Key capabilities of the METEOR 2 workflow management system (WFMS) include a comprehensive toolkit for building workflows (map/data/task design) and supporting high-level process modeling, detailed workflow specification, and automatic code generation for its workflow enactment ...

. Workflow Management is a technique to integrate and automate the execution of steps that comprise a complex process, e:g:; a business process. Workflow Management Systems (WFMSs) primarily evolved from industry to cater to the growing demand for office automation tools among businesses. Coincidentally, database researchers developed several extended transaction models to handle similar applications. Although the goals of both the communities were the same, the issues they focused on were different. The workflow community primarily focused on modeling aspects to accurately capture the data and control flow requirements between the steps that comprise a workflow, while the database community focused on correctness aspects to ensure data consistency of sub-transactions that comprise a transaction. However, we now see a confluence of some of the ideas, with additional features being gradually offered by WFMSs. This paper provides an overview of correctness in workflow management. Correct...

. In this paper, we focus on the definition and adaptation of the execution behavior of a task in order to support flexible workflows in the presence of distributed workflow enactment. We argue that an adequate behavior definition is the basis for both, modeling less-restrictive workflows in advance as well as supporting dynamic workflow changes. We show how different control flow dependency types can be specified in our approach and can be used to define less-restrictive workflows. Furthermore, we discuss the definition of an adequate behavior for dynamic modifications in different situations. In particular, we describe how the application of and reaction to dynamic changes can be adapted in our approach depending on the process context and the behavior of a task itself. 1. Introduction The development of process-model based workflow management systems (WFMS) has been driven mostly by focussing well-structured business processes from the viewpoint of transactional processing. WFMSs a...

Abstract: Web services technology is all about distributed computing. There is no fundamentally new basic concept behind this and related technologies. What is really new is the reach of Web services and its ubiquitous support by literally all major vendors. Most likely, heterogeneity will at the end no longer be an obstruction for distributed applications. This will have impact on application architectures, middleware, as well as the way in which people will think about computing and businesses use computing resources. We sketch these impacts as well as some exemplary research work to be done to actually build the outline environment. 1

Abstract. Management of business and software processes are areas of increasing interest, which evolved nearly independently from each other. In this article we present an approach to process management that has been applied to business and software processes and which, thereby, enabled cross-fertilization between both areas. The goal of this article is to report lessons learned in industrial as well as academic business and software process management projects.

Workflow management systems have attracted a great deal of attention due to their ability to integrate heterogeneous, distributed applications into coherent business processing environments. In spite of their limitations, existing products are enjoying considerable success since they are the first practical implementation of functionality and concepts studied for many years. The goals may have changed from office automation and computer supported cooperative work to business processes and re-engineering, but the basic ideas and concepts have remained the same. It would be a mistake, however, not to try to see beyond current systems and applications. In today's computer environments, the trend towards using many small computers instead of a few big ones has revived the old dream of distributed computing. But there is a significant lack of tools for implementing, operating and maintaining such systems. Most existing solutions still belong to the mainframe world and are only slowly making...

Service outsourcing is the business paradigm in which an organization has part of its business process performed by a service provider. In dynamic markets, service providers can be selected on the fly during process enactment. The cooperation between the parties is specified in a dynamically made electronic contract. This contract includes a process specification that is tailored towards service brokering and cross-organizational process enactment and, hence, has to conform to market and specification standards. Process enactment, however, relies on intra-organizational process specifications that have to comply with the infrastructure available in an organization for process and data management. In this paper, we present a three-level process and data specification framework for dynamic contract-based outsourcing of complex services. We focus on services with an externally visible control flow, as opposed to simple, black-box web services. The framework relates the two process specification levels through a third, conceptual level. This approach is inspired by the well-known ANSI-SPARC model for data management. We discuss an abstract architecture for dynamic service outsourcing based on the three-level framework. We show how the framework and architecture can be placed in the context of existing infrastructures for cross-organizational process support. As service outsourcing is used more and more for core business processes requiring reliable execution, we pay special attention to transaction management. 1

Abstract The amount of stored information is exploding while, at the same time, tools for accessing relevant information are rather under-developed. Usually, all users have a pre-defined view on a global information space and have to access data by the same primitive means. However, a more convenient solution from a user’s point of view considers her/his individual context and interests by mapping the global information space to a personal one. Yet, the organization and personalization of information spaces induces a set of tightly related problems: First, user interfaces have to present personalized information in a user-friendly way and have to be enriched by sophisticated, context-sensitive navigation techniques. Second, the personal information space has to be organized automatically, by exploiting similarities between multimedia documents. Third, in order to allow the user to influence the automatic organization of her/his information space, relevance feedback techniques for multimedia similarity search have to be provided. Finally, taken into account that information is replicated at several sources and is subject to modification, sophisticated coordination mechanisms have to guarantee consistent views on the global information space. In this paper, we introduce the vision of hyperdatabases as the core infrastructure to support these requirements in a holistic way. Moreover, we present the ETHWorld project and its sub-projects in which we apply hyperdatabase concepts for managing and organizing the information space of a virtual campus.

this paper, we present the Exotica research project currently in progress at the IBM Almaden Research Center. One of the goals of the project is to bring together industrial trends and research issues in the workflow area. It is for this reason that we have focused on a particular commercial product, FlowMark, IBM's workflow product [15, 16, 19, 20]. However, our results are easily generalized to other WFMSs since FlowMark's model is similar to that proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition [13]. In particular, the rest of this paper contains a high-level overview of our research in six specific areas that are not product specific. The list of these areas is not, by any means, exhaustive. There are still many issues that remain open. We also discuss the relationship between WFMSs and transaction processing monitors.

Abstract. Handling workflow transactional behavior remains a main problem to ensure a correct and reliable execution. It is obvious that the discovery, and the explanation of this behavior, would enable to better understand and control workflow recovery. Unfortunately, previous workflow mining works have concentrated their efforts on control flow aspects. Although powerful, these proposals are found lacking in functionalities and performance when used to discover workflow transactional behavior. In this paper, we describe mining techniques, which are able to discover a workflow model, and to improve its transactional behavior from event based logs. First, we propose an algorithm to discover workflow patterns. Then, we propose techniques to discover activities transactional dependencies that allow us to mine workflow recovery techniques. Finally, based on this mining step, we use a set of rules to improve workflow design.