Content:

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

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

An advanced aspect is new research in WFMS technology. In particular, the use of internet techniques like web services and standardization approaches for process modeling, orchestration, and choreography in service-oriented architectures will be presented.

In the realization part of the course, various implementation techniques and architectural issues to realize workflow-management systems as well as diverse system types and concrete workflow-management systems are presented.

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 evaluate 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:

• W.M.P. van der Aalst. The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management. The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers, Seiten 1-45, Band 7:1, 1998.
• S. Jablonski, M. Böhm, W. Schulze (Hrsg.): Workflow-Management - Entwicklung von Anwendungen und Systemen. dpunkt-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1997
• Frank Leymann, Dieter Roller: Production Workflows - Concepts and Techniques. Prentice-Hall, 2000
• W.M.P. van der Aalst: Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems. MIT Press, 368 pp., 2002
• Michael Havey: Essential Business Process Modeling. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2005

Further Literature:

• M. Dumas, Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede (eds.): Process-Aware Information Systems. Wiley, 2005
• D. Harel: Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems, Science of Computer Programming Vol. 8, 1987.
• Dirk Wodtke, Gerhard Weikum A Formal Foundation for Distributed Workflow Execution Based on State Charts. Foto N. Afrati, Phokion Kolaitis (Eds.): Database Theory - ICDT '97, 6th International Conference, Delphi, Greece, January 8-10, 1997, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1186, Springer Verlag, Seiten 230-246, 1997.
• H.M.W. Verbeek, T. Basten, and W.M.P. van der Aalst Diagnosing workflow processes using Woflan. Computing Science Report 99/02, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, 1999.