Integrated workflow planning and coordination

Abstract

Two major tasks in process management are the planning of a process and the coordination of its execution. Workflow management systems support and automate the coordination of a process, but planning the process remains a manual task. This paper argues that planning and coordination are closely interrelated and therefore restricting the attention to the automation of coordination can lead to problems concerning consistency and performance. A concept is presented to avoid these problems by adding automated planning. It is shown how planning algorithms from Artificial Intelligence can be combined with workflow management concepts to build an integrated workflow planning and coordination system. Advantages, limitations and areas of application of this approach are discussed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.