End-user feedback in multi-user workflow systems

Abstract

Workflow systems are more and more common due to the automation of business processes. The automation of business processes enables organizations to simplify their processes, improve services and contain costs. A problem with using workflow systems is that processes once known by heart, are now hidden from the user. This, combined with time pressure, lack of experience and an abundance of options, makes it harder for a user to make the right choices. To aid users of these systems, we have developed a multi-user rule-based problem-solving framework that can be instantiated for many workflow systems. It provides hints to the end user on how to achieve her goals and makes life for the programmer easier, as she only needs to instantiate the framework instead of programming an ad-hoc solution. Our approach consists of two parts. First, we present a domain-specific language (DSL) that offers commonly used constructs for combining components of different rule-based problems. Second, we use generic search algorithms to solve various kinds of problems. We show a practical implementation with an example workflow system. We show that this system fulfills several desirable properties. CCS CONCEPTS• Theory of computation → Formal languages and automata theory.