Univ., Diss.--Hannover, 2002.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / Developing an optimal working environment and managing the of work load in an efficient manner are the major challenges for most businesses today. So, the importance of the workflow and workflow management in an organization is unquestionable. Many organizations use sophisticated systems to organize the workflows. One such workflow system based on a concise and powerful modeling language called “Yet Another Workflow Language” is YAWL. YAWL handles complex data, transformations, integration with organizational resources and Web Service integration. Workflow comprises of three main perspectives: control-flow, data and the resources. In Yawl, the control-flow and the data-flow are tightly coupled within the workflow enactment engine. But the resource perspective is provided by a discrete custom service called Resource Service. Administrative tools are provided using which the administrator has to manually select the resource (referred as participant) which needs to perform a particular task of the workflow. This project aims at developing a service which can automate the assignment of the tasks to the participants by using the Resource service which provides number of interfaces that expose the full functionality of the service. The application of this project with respect to Healthcare domain is presented. Healthcare domain is the one of the most demanding and yet critical business process. Hospitals face increasing pressure to both improve the quality of the services delivered to patients and to reduce costs .Hence there is significant demand on hospitals in regard to how the organization, execution, and monitoring of work processes is performed. Workflow Management Systems like YAWL offers a potential solution as they support processes by managing the flow of work.

<p>Nowadays, with the rapid development of Information technology, workflow management technology has undoubtedly become the basic component of enterprise information system construction, the research and application level regarding workflow management technology directly determine the level of enterprise information system. By virtue of using workflow management system within enterprises, could advance the operating efficiency of business processes and enhance enterprise competition ability.</p><p>This paper describes the origin and status of workflow management, analyses on the base of the workflow reference model of Workflow Management Coalition; discusses the overall requirements of workflow management system, especially for large-scale enterprises, which includes workflow engines, process design tools, administration and monitoring tools, and client tools thesis four essential components; as well as studies on the workflow modeling techniques and adopts the method based on UML activity diagram to achieve modeling. Along with proposes a design and realization method concerning how to construct a workflow management structure, which utilizes J2EE lightweight workflow engine to meet changeful business processes and diverse deployment environments.</p>

Univ., Diss.--Bamberg,, 2003.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Reproducible computing and research are of great importance for scientific investigation in any discipline. This thesis presents a general approach to provenance in the context of workflows for widely used script languages. Our solution is based on system integration, and is demonstrated by integrating MATLAB with VisTrails, an open source scientific workflow system. The integrated VisTrails-MATLAB system supports reproducible computing with truly prospective and retrospective provenance at multiple granularity levels as scientists choose for their scripts, and at the same time, is very easy to use.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems are used by thousands of engineering companies world wide. Improving these systems will have a drastic and global effect. One possible improvement is to integrate synchronous collaborative applications with PLM systems. These applications allow multiple people to work on a single digital object simultaneously. They have already been shown to reduce the time a task requires. Using these applications to complete a project will reduce the project time. However, simply including synchronous collaborative applications within a PLM system ignores powerful benefits that could provide further time-saving benefits. The integration must allow improved awareness at the project level, so that users can mediate their own actions.This thesis presents a method for such an integration. It also presents a prototype which implements that method. Testing was carried out using this prototype. As hypothesized, including synchronous collaborative applications shortened the overall project time. In addition, providing awareness information and allowing users to mediate themselves further shortened project times and reduced variation in those times. Proper integration should therefore provide awareness at the project level and allow users to mediate themselves to some extent.

I dagens konkurrensutsatta marknad är det en nödvändighet för organisationer att kontinuerligt effektivisera sina affärsprocesser med avgörande betydelse för tillväxt. Eftersom dessa processer är essentiella byggstenar för en organisations framgång har systemstöd avseende processmanagement blivit en viktig faktor i strävan efter att uppfylla organisationens mål och förbättra sin konkurrenskraft. Med detta i åtanke är det intressant att studera i vilken grad workflowsystem kan bidra till att förbättra organisationers affärsprocesser. Mot bakgrund av dessa snabbskiftande marknadsförutsättningar kommer studien behandla processrelaterade systemstöd med syftet att undersöka situationen för samtidens workflowbaserade optimeringar och utröna framtida visioner gällande automatisk processmanagement. Undersökningen har utförts genom en kvalitativ kund- och marknadsanalys avseende IT-företaget Medius AB där intervjuer, deltagande observationer och dokumentstudier legat till grund för en abduktiv analys. Företaget är en leverantör av processrelaterat IT-stöd och den övergripande affärsidén är att med hjälp av system förenkla och automatisera organisationers skilda processer. Studien visar bland annat att leverantörserbjudanden och definitioner gällande processmanagement skiljer sig åt globalt och nationellt och att det i dagens konkurrensutsatta marknad är svårt att motivera processer utöver sådana som genererar en direkt organisationsnytta. Vidare framkommer trender inom processmanagementområdet, bland annat Case Management, Business Process Management och outsourcing av organisationsprocesser. Studien visar också att den framtida workflowmarknaden förutspås innehålla produkter som stödjer hela organisationer involverandes partner, leverantörer och kunder och inte endast interna processer. / In today's competitive market it is a necessity for organizations to continuously improve their business processes which are critical to growth. Since these processes are essential for organizational success it has become important to support them via information systems in order to meet organizational goals and to improve competitiveness. Thus it is interesting to study to what extent workflow systems can help improve organizations' business processes. In light of these rapidly changing market conditions, this study will examine process-related system support with the aim to investigate the situation of today's workflow-based optimizations, and explore future visions regarding automatic process management. The study was conducted through a qualitative customer and market analysis for the IT company Medius AB, where interviews, participant observations and document studies formed the basis of an abductive analysis. The company is a supplier of process-related IT support and its overall business concept is to offer systems to simplify and automate organizations' separate processes. The result of this study shows, for example, that the definitions and offerings from the vendors differ globally and nationally, and that it is difficult in today's competitive market to justify processes other than those that generate direct organizational benefits. Furthermore, different trends in the field of business process management have been identified, a few examples being Case Management, Business Process Management and outsourcing of organizational processes. The study also shows that the future workflow market is predicted to contain products that support the entire organization and not only specific processes, including partners, suppliers and customers.

Workflow management promises a solution to an age-old problem: controlling,monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes. What is new about workflow management is the explicit representation of the business process logic which allows for computerized support. In the light of this support, many researchers developed different approaches to model new systems with different capabilities to solve this age-old problem. One of the approaches is using logicbased methodology for the specification and execution of workflows. Here, the event calculus, a logic programming formalism for representing events and their effects especially in database applications, is used for this approach. It is shown that the control flow graph of a workflow specification can be expressed as a set of logical formulas and the event calculus can be used to specify the role of a workflow manager through a set of rules for the execution dependencies of activities. Constructed workflow formalization through Event Calculus is realized by using recent technologies, and the resulting product is named as EventFlow,including some administrative interfaces to manage system and workflow engine. The thesis describes the architecture and implementation details of EventFlow, an editor developed for graphical representation of control flow graph, and technologies used in the implementation. And an example application is built to show the usability and execution of the implemented system.

Universiẗat, Diss.--Duisburg-Essen, 2007.

Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Diss.