[ACM Press the 2004 ACM symposium - Nicosia, Cyprus (2004.03.14-2004.03.17)] Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing - SAC '04 - Enhancement of workflow flexibility by composing activities at run-time

✍ Scribed by Deng, ShuiGuang; Yu, Zhen; Wu, ZhaoHui; Huang, LiCan

• Book ID: 121377032
• Publisher: ACM Press
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 382 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN-13: 9781581138122
• DOI: 10.1145/967900.968041

✦ Synopsis

Flexibility has recently grown to be one of the major research topics in the area of workflow management. A workflow system that supports flexible processes will benefit organizations more. In this paper, we present a workflow model offering flexibility by enabling activities to be composed automatically or manually at run-time. Our model uses selection constraints and composition constraints t o guide end users to build valid workflow specifications. As an application of this model, we outline the architecture of our multi-agent based workflow management system, of which model agents play the role to complete workflow specifications according to run-time information of instances. We put forward an important algorithm related to the model agent, which is to compose activities into a valid subprocess with the shortest critical path.