Intention‐driven modeling for flexible workflow applications

Abstract

During the early 1990s, workflow technologies were the only ones to offer a transversal integration capacity to the enterprise applications, thus allowing the representation and the enactment of business processes. However, the formalisms developed for workflow specifications were almost systematically activity oriented. Consequently, the resulting process definitions have the advantage to be easily transformable in executable code, but the disadvantage of being prescriptive and rigid. Recent works underline the needs in term of flexible and adaptive workflows, whose execution can evolve according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. In fact, a flexible representation of business processes is an asset to maintain the fit between business processes and their supporting systems in an evolving environment. This article proposes a conceptual framework for an intention-driven modeling of flexible workflow applications. The purpose of the underlying modeling formalism is to define an integration/orchestration for islands of business process chunks and their support systems in order to create and to maintain the fit between them. The modeling framework offers the ability to represent in the same business process definition the well-structured process chunks as well as the ill-structured or ad hoc ones.Most of the existing process modeling formalisms concentrate on Who does What, When aspects, i.e. on the description of the operational performance of tasks to produce results. Despite the fact that process modeling appears to be essential to help managers improve operational performance, it demonstrated to be insufficient to help organizations in a constantly changing environment. Among others, Rummler (Rummler and Brache 1995) argues, for example, that a more systemic view of an organization is necessary to handle the problem 'in the large' and suggests abstracting from the details of process models in a goal model (Antón et al.

Business Process Lines to Deal with the Variability

“…The concept of goal expresses an intention. The more recent goaloriented approaches [22], [23] define stable characteristics of the business that any organization choice must respect but also the variation points. Compound goals can be decomposed into sub-goals.…”

“…Actors perform activities that specify the smaller work steps in a business process. A comprehensive version of this organizational model is presented in [23]. …”

“…The most recent type of process models [8], [11], [23], [24] is based on the decision-(or intention) oriented paradigm according to which the successive transformations of the product are looked upon as consequences of decisions. Those models are semantically more powerful because they explain not only how the process proceeds but also why [21].…”

“…We consider that a business process chunk [23] operationalizes a map section, which cannot be refined any more using intentional/decisional considerations (see Figure 9). In other words, a business process chunk defines the internal structure of a business service by the means of a flow of activities leading to the construction of the desired product and/or service.…”

From End-User’s Requirements to Web Services Retrieval: A Semantic and Intention-Driven Approach

“…Decision-oriented models are semantically more powerful than the other process models because they explain not only how the process proceeds but also why. Their enactment guides the decision making process that shapes the process, and helps reasoning about the rationale [13]. Our approach is based on the adaptation of such a decision-oriented model called the map model [21].…”