Prototype of object-oriented declarative workflows

Abstract

While in the traditional workflow processes the control flow is determined statically within process definitions, in declarative workflow processes the control flow is dynamic and implicit, determined by conditions that occur in the workflow data and the service environment. The environment consists of active objects, which play a double role. On the one hand, they are persistent data structures that can be queried and managed according to the syntax and semantics of a query language. On the other hand, active objects possess executable parts and represent workflow processes or tasks. The approach is motivated by features that are desirable in complex and less regular business processes: (1) the possibility of dynamic changes of process instances during their run, (2) mass parallelism of process instances and their components and (3) shifting the availability of resources that workflows deal with on the primary plan as a mean for triggering instances of process tasks. The paper presents the prototype of an object-oriented declarative workflows on a comprehensive example with roots in a real business case. © 2011 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.