Improving Flexibility of workflow Management Systems

Abstract

In order to support both the redesign of a Business Process and its continuous improvement, the technology supporting it must be as flexible as possible. Since workflow management systems are the main technology for supporting Business Processes, they and, in particular, their modeling framework must satisfy a long list of apparently conflicting requirements: the models must be both cognitive artifacts and executable programs; they must be simple and yet able to support exceptions; they must support both static and dynamic changes. In this chapter, after briefly discussing the above requirements, we present the formal aspects of the modeling framework of the Milano workflow management system. Its flexibility is based on a net-theoretical modeling framework which lets simple process models deliver a large class of services to its users