Yank Your Data Out of My Engine: A New Approach to Workflow System Design

Abstract

Business process (or workflow) management is vital in enterprise application systems. Current workflow management systems (WfMSs) do not provide a clear separation between execution management and data management; such a lack of separation causes serious difficulties in managing data consistency and process change. This paper argues for an "execution independence" principle of isolating the two and thus their respective concerns. Following this principle, "universal artifacts" and a new conceptual architecture for WfMSs are developed, which help addressing many challenging issues in application development with the current WfMSs.

Querying Workflow Logs

“…Conditions (2) and (3) together guarantee that the first and only the first log record of every workflow is a START record. Condition (3) further insists that the instance-specific log sequence numbers of each workflow instance is also an initial segment of the natural numbers starting from 1.…”

“…The state-of-the-art design/development methodology for BP/workflow management systems places the data needed for analysis in process logs, activity logs, data stores, process models, and even execution engines [2,3]. In the past two decades, the database community invested significant effort into data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) to help enterprises with their analysis of workflow executions.…”