Workflow-Management-Systems as enterprise engineering tools

Abstract

Workflow-Management is a growing research area in computer science. It focuses on the modeling of coarse grain abstract processes called workflows as well as on software architectures and systems for their execution.Enterprise Integration (EI) deals besides other aspects with enterprise or business processes which are a description of complex tasks within an enterprise involving humans or machines, data and applications. Since business processes developed by techniques of EI should finally be enacted to actively drive the enterprise an execution mechanism is required. We argue that Workflow-Management-Systems (WFMS) are a technology which can be deployed as enterprise engineering tools in order to enact enterprise processes.

Exploring business process modelling paradigms and design-time to run-time transitions

“…Imperative process enactment techniques allow for automatic routing of the work based on exactly specified execution paths. Consequently, imperative process enactment requires a full specification of each valid execution path in the process model (Aguiar and Weston 1995, Bussler 1996, Burstein et al 2005. Examples of imperative process Declarative process enactment techniques support a dynamic run-time development of the execution scenario of an individual process instance.…”