Abstract
Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) coordinate execution of logically related multiple tasks in an organization. A workflow schema is defined using a set of tasks that are coordinated using dependencies. Workflows instantiated from the same schema may differ with respect to the tasks executed. An important issue that must be addressed while designing a workflow is to decide what tasks are needed for the workflow to complete – we refer to this set as the completion set. Since different tasks are executed in different workflow instances, a workflow schema may be associated with multiple completion sets. Incorrect specification of completion sets may prohibit some workflow from completing. Manually generating these sets for large workflow schemas can be an error-prone and tedious process. Our goal is to automate this process. We investigate the factors that affect the completion of a workflow. Specifically, we study the impact of control-flow dependencies on completion sets and show how this knowledge can be used for automatically generating these sets. Finally, we provide an algorithm that can be used by application developers to generate the completion sets associated with a workflow schema.
This work was partially supported by NSF under Award No. IIS 0242258.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Alonso, G., Agrawal, D., Abbadi, A., Kamath, M., Gunthor, R., Mohan, C.: Advanced Transaction Models in Workflow Contexts. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Data Engineering, February 1996, pp. 574–581 (1996)
Atluri, V., Huang, W.-K., Bertino, E.: An Execution Model for Multilevel Secure Workflows. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh IFIP WG11.3 Working Conference on Database Security, August 1997, pp. 151–165 (1997)
Attie, P.C., Singh, M.P., Sheth, A.P., Rusinkiewicz, M.: Specifying and Enforcing Intertask Dependencies. In: Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Dublin, Ireland, August 1993, pp. 134–145. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1993)
Biliris, A., Dar, S., Gehani, N., Jagadish, H.V., Ramamritham, K.: ASSET: A System for Supporting Extended Transactions. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (May 1994)
Chrysanthis, P.: ACTA, A Framework for Modeling and Reasoning about Extended Transactions Models. Ph.D. Thesis (September 1991)
Hollingsworth, D.: Workflow Reference Model. Technical report, Workflow Management Coalition, Brussels, Belgium (1994)
Ray, I., Xin, T., Zhu, Y.: Ensuring task dependencies during workflow recovery. In: Galindo, F., Takizawa, M., Traunmüller, R. (eds.) DEXA 2004. LNCS, vol. 3180, pp. 24–33. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Rusinkiewicz, M., Sheth, A.P.: Specification and Execution of Transactional Workflows. In: Modern Database Systems, pp. 592–620 (1995)
Singh, M.P.: Semantical Considerations on Workflows: An Algebra for Intertask Dependencies. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Database Programming Languages. Electronic Workshops in Computing. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)
van der Aalst, W.M.P., van Hee, K.M., Houben, G.J.: Modelling Workflow Management Systems with High-Level Petri Nets. In: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Petri Nets and Related Formalisms (October 1994)
Xin, T., Ray, I.: Detecting Dependency Conflicts in Advanced Transaction Models. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Database Applications and Engineering Symposium, Montreal, Canada (July 2005)
Xin, T., Zhu, Y., Ray, I.: Reliable scheduling of advanced transactions. In: Jajodia, S., Wijesekera, D. (eds.) Data and Applications Security 2005. LNCS, vol. 3654, pp. 124–138. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Zhu, Y., Xin, T., Ray, I.: Recovering from malicious attacks in workflow systems. In: Andersen, K.V., Debenham, J., Wagner, R. (eds.) DEXA 2005. LNCS, vol. 3588, pp. 14–23. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Xin, T., Ray, I., Chundi, P., Chaichana, S. (2006). On the Completion of Workflows. In: Bressan, S., Küng, J., Wagner, R. (eds) Database and Expert Systems Applications. DEXA 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4080. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11827405_57
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11827405_57
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37871-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37872-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)