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Workflow Patterns

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Definition

Differences in features supported by the various contemporary commercial workflow management systems point to different insights of suitability and different levels of expressive power. One way to characterize these differences and to support modelers in designing non-trivial workflows, is to use a patterns-based approach. Requirements for workflow languages can be indicated through workflow patterns, i.e., frequently recurring structures in processes that need support from some process-aware information system. The Workflow Patterns Initiative [6] aims at the systematic identification of workflow requirements in the form of patterns.

The Workflow Patterns Initiative resulted in various collections of patterns. The initial twenty control-flow patterns have been extended with additional control-flow patterns and patterns for other perspectives such as the resource, data, and exception handling perspectives. All of these patterns have been used to evaluate different systems in...

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Recommended Reading

  1. van der Aalst W.M.P., ter Hofstede A.H.M., Kiepuszewski B., and Barros A.P. Workflow patterns. Distrib. Parallel Database, 14(1):5–51, 2003.

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  2. Casati F., Castano S., Fugini M.G., Mirbel I., and Pernici B. Using patterns to design rules in workflows. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng., 26(8):760–785, 2000.

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  3. Hohpe G. and Woolf B. Enterprise Integration Patterns. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 2003.

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  4. Russell N., van der Aalst W.M.P., ter Hofstede A.H.M., and Edmond D. Workflow resource patterns: identification, representation and tool support. In Proc. 17th Int. Conf. on Advanced Information Systems Eng., 2005, pp. 216–232.

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  5. Russell N., ter Hofstede A.H.M., Edmond D., and van der Aalst W.M.P. Workflow data patterns: identification, representation and tool support. In Proc. 24th Int. Conf. on Conceptual Modeling, 2005, pp. 353–368.

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  6. Workflow Patterns Home Page. http://www.workflowpatterns.com.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven,  , The Netherlands

    W. M. P. van der Aalst

Authors
  1. W. M. P. van der Aalst
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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van der Aalst, W. (2009). Workflow Patterns. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_826

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