The action workflow approach to workflow management technology

Medina-Mora, Raul; Winograd, Terry; Flores, Rodrigo; Flores, Fernando

doi:10.1080/01972243.1993.9960152

Cited by 134 publications

(123 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…), on the flow of control across actions, on some communication patterns * Notice that while the construction of grammars could be performed by end-users with a specific aptitude and competence for modelling, the design of new elements for the notation is a pure programming activity that requires specialized technical skills. among roles (negotiation), or on some predefined combination of these (Ellis, 1979;Cook, 1980;Shepherd et al, 1990;Medina-Mora et al, 1992;Swenson et al, 1994). Since the adequacy of the language strongly depends on which aspects of articulation work are to be supported and on the organizational environment in which the planned coordination mechanisms are intended to operate, Ariadne does not impose a preconceived modeling approach.…”

Section: In Lieu Of a Conclusion: The Ariadne Notationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design

Schmidt

Simone

1996

Comput Supported Coop Work

554

366

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The paper outlines an approach to CSCW systems design based on the concept of 'coordination mechanisms.' The concept of coordination mechanisms has been developed as a generalization of phenomena described in empirical investigations of the use of artifacts for the purpose of coordinating cooperative activities in different work domains. On the basis of the evidence of this corpus of empirical studies, the paper outlines a theory of the use of artifacts for coordination purposes in cooperative work settings, derives a set of general requirements for computational coordination mechanisms, and sketches the architecture of Ariadne, a CSCW infrastructure for constructing and running such malleable and linkable computational coordination mechanisms.A major research issue in CSCW is to understand how computer systems can be instrumental in reducing the complexity of coordinating cooperative activities, individually conducted and yet interdependent.In fact, the issue was identified and defined with admirable precision quite early in the history of CSCW, by Anatol Holt: 'The new capabilities at which coordination technology aims depend on finding and installing appropriate conceptual and structural units with which to express tasks, their diverse relations to each other and to the people who ultimately bear responsibility for them.' 'To be useful, this must be done in a flexible yet well-integrated manner, with plenty of leeway for the unpredictability of real life.' (Holt, 1985, p. 281).Since then, this issue has been investigated by a range of eminent CSCW researchers. The initial results were not encouraging, however, in that coordination facilities were experienced as excessively rigid, either because the underlying protocol was not accessible and could not be modified (e.g., The Coordinator, cf. Winograd, 1986;Winograd and Flores, 1986;Flores et al., 1988), or because the facilities for changing the protocol did not support actors in modifying the protocol (e.g., DOMINO, cf. Kreifelts et al., 1991a;Kreifelts et al., 1991b).

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Section: In Lieu Of a Conclusion: The Ariadne Notationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design

Schmidt

Simone

1996

Comput Supported Coop Work

554

366

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“…Finally, concerning the realization of cross-organizational business processes and, in particular, of human-oriented workflows, whose nature is intrinsically social and where the notion of commitment plays a fundamental role [Medina-Mora et al 1993], it is relevant to cite LoST [Singh 2011]: a commitment-based model for defining declarative protocols. It exploits vectors, each associated to one of the interacting agents, containing the local history of the sent/received messages.…”

Section: Conclusion and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Commitment-Based Infrastructure for Programming Socio-Technical Systems

Baldoni

Baroglio

Capuzzimati

2014

ACM Trans. Internet Technol.

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Socio-Technical Systems demand an evolution of computing into social computing, with a transition from an individualistic to a societal view. As such, they seem particularly suitable to realize multi-party, crossorganizational systems. Multi-Agent Systems are a natural candidate to realize Socio-Technical Systems. However, while Socio-Technical Systems envisage an explicit layer that contains the regulations that all parties must respect in their interaction, and thus preserve the agents' autonomy, current frameworks and platforms require to hard-code the coordination requirements inside the agents. We propose to explicitly represent the missing layer of Socio-Technical Systems in terms of social relationships among the involved parties, i.e. in terms of a set of normatively defined relationships among two or more parties, subject to social control by monitoring the observable behaviour. In our proposal, social relationships are resources, available to agents, who use them in their practical reasoning. Both agents and social relationships are first-class entities of the model. The work also describes 2COMM4JADE, a framework that realizes the proposal by extending the well-known JADE and CArtAgO. The impact of the approach on programming is explained both conceptually and with the help of an example.

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“…As their main abstraction they use a folder with documents which is passed from one worker to the next. Other systems are server-based, such as DOMINO (Kreifelts et al, 1991a) or Action Workflow (Medina-Mora et al, 1992). They use a central database server for scheduling the work procedures and delegating steps.…”

Section: Systems Supporting Specific Aspectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several theories, such as activity theory (Kuutti, 1991), coordination theory (Malone and Crowston, 1990), communication for action (Winograd, 1988), or the action workflow approach (Medina-Mora et al, 1992) can coexist in the model, and each one can be used for modeling corresponding specific activity kinds.…”

Section: Abstraction and Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Object-oriented activity support: A model for integrated CSCW systems

Teege

1996

Comput Supported Coop Work

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This paper proposes a model for integrated CSCW systems, the model of Object-Oriented Activity Support OOActSM. In contrast to existing systems for the support of collaborative work, the model aims at the integrated support of all aspects of CSCW in a single frame system. The major properties of our model are the use of "activity" as the basic concept and the use of object-oriented mechanisms for providing solutions of typical CSCW problems. I demonstrate how all major aspects of current CSCW systems can be supported and integrated with each other in our model.

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The action workflow approach to workflow management technology

Cited by 134 publications

References 2 publications

Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design

Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design

A Commitment-Based Infrastructure for Programming Socio-Technical Systems

Object-oriented activity support: A model for integrated CSCW systems

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