This paper presents a survey of current research in the areas of workflow and workflow management systems. We motivate this work by introducing the underlying problems and how they can be addressed by workflow systems. We review and examine the terminology, concepts, methodologies, and problems in the relevant areas. The general requirements of workflow management systems are also introduced and discussed. We present the modeling and specification of both tasks and workflows. We also discuss the dependencies that exist between tasks and how to best define, model and enforce them. An important part of this survey is an examination of important products, including their characteristics and applications. The article is concluded by introducing some research issues which we believe to be critical for the advancement of the theory of workflow as well as the design and usage of workflow management systems.

The Workflow Management System AltaVista Works has been extended to be able to process workflows in a distributed, partly even parallel manner. Build-time data are replicated over all participating workflow servers. The distribution of workflow execution is based on migration. Instead of the usual, static pre-partitioning, highly dynamic management of distribution is applied. 1 Introduction The need for more efficient offices led to the concept of Business Process Re-engineering and to the technology that we call Workflow Management System (WMS). Early WMSs concentrated on small groups of users in a centralized environment. With the growing acceptance of workflows, the technology is used more and more in large organizations, which generate a high load and which are inherently distributed. These two new aspects leads to the desire to turn existing WMSs into distributed ones (DWMS). 2 Workflow-Management Workflow-Management is the automatization of business processes (BP). The partic...

In large workflow management systems (WfMS), it is particularly important to control workflows (WF) in an efficient manner. A very critical factor within this context is the resulting communication overhead. For this reason we have developed an approach for distributed WF control, which tries to keep the communication overhead low. In this paper, this approach is described and examined by means of a simulation. 1 Introduction Enterprise-wide and cross-enterprise WF scenarios are characterized by a large number of users and many concurrently active WF instances. Therefore, the WF servers have to cope with a high load in total. Furthermore, in such an environment, the different organizational units (OU) are often far away from each other and connected by slow wide area networks (WAN). For this reason, the load of the communication system is an extremely critical aspect. Because of the resulting communication overhead a centralized WF control is often not applicable (at least not at rea...

to create formal process models sufficient to increase the level of trust that stakeholders have in digital government. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “trust ” as: “confidence in some quality or attribute of a person or thing”. We believe that the most valuable resource of any government is constituents ’ trust that it will do its job well. Thus effective management of this trust resource must be a central activity. Our premise is that much government work can be characterized as the creation, execution, and modification of processes. In the course of automating government, clarifying these processes and their properties to all stakeholders through the use of appropriately derived formal models will increase stakeholder trust, thereby making digital government more effective. Creation of legislation, law enforcement, licensing facilitation, conduct of elections, resource appropriation, and disaster response are vital governmental processes. The impact of creating and executing these processes ranges from minimizing annoyance to saving lives. For us, the crucial issue is to assure government stakeholders that these key processes are indeed trustworthy. Government stakeholders include citizens, legislators, agency managers, agency staff, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the judiciary, professional groups and corporate