Konzepte und Anwendung von Workflowsystemen

Content:

Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) support the management of business processes according to pre-defined process descriptions. Manging processes flexibly, i.e., handle deviations, e.g., in order to catch exceptions, adapt processes to modified process environments or to support ad-hoc workflows, becomes more and more important.

The course starts with dicussing WfMS in the context of business-information systems and their relationship with the more common business-process modelling. Petri nets and pi-calculus are introduced as basic formalisms. Then, methods to model workflows and the design process for workflow-management applications are presented in detail and supplemented with exercises.

Objective:

A goal of the course is that the participants are able to model workflows, to explain modelling aspects and their relationships, to compare modelling methods, and to evlauate the usability of these methods in different application areas. They should understand the technical construction of workflow-management systems with the most important components and different architectures and implementation alternatives. Finally, the participants should have obtained an overview on actual relevant standardization proposals and how to use these approaches, and they should be aware of actual research topics.

Literature:

  • Workflow Management Coalition Reference Model
  • Matthias Weske: Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures. 2. Auflage, Springer, 2012
  • W.M.P. Van der Aalst: Business Process Management: A Comprehensive Survey. ISRN Software Engineering, 2013, pp. 1-37
  • Thomas Allweyer: BPMN 2.0 Business Process Model and Notation, 2. Auflage,  Norderstedt Books on Demand, 2009
  • Frank Leymann, Dieter Roller: Production Workflows - Concepts and Techniques. Prentice-Hall, 2000

Elcetive Literature:

is given in the respective chapters