Modeling cooperative work for workflow management

Abstract

Characteristic to workflow management is modeling of workflow of manual coordination activities and automated production activities. Conceptual models are used to analyze and describe workflow, though most of these models are not very suitable for representing and relating both coordination activities and production activities. In the Input-Process-Output paradigm, workflow is modeled in terms of processes and data flow, whereas the Customer-Supplier paradigm defines conversation patterns between the actors. The rather intimate relationship between actor interactions and processual structures is recorded in neither of them. In this paper, we suggest to extend the IPO paradigm with concepts for coordination activities. We introduce actors and services as a separate model, and show how two-way flows, ports and rules help us model cooperative and manual aspects in data flow diagrams.