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 nontrivial 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 20 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 a...
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van der Aalst WMP, ter Hofstede AHM, Kiepuszewski B, Barros AP. Workflow patterns. Distrib Parallel Database. 2003;14(1):5–51.
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Russell N, van der Aalst WMP, ter Hofstede AHM, Edmond D. Workflow resource patterns: identification, representation and tool support. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering; 2005. p. 216–32.
Russell N, ter Hofstede AHM, Edmond D, van der Aalst WMP. Workflow data patterns: identification, representation and tool support. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling; 2005, p. 353–68.
Workflow Patterns Home Page. http://www.workflowpatterns.com.
Russell N, van der Aalst WMP, ter Hofstede A. Workflow Patterns: The Definitive Guide. MIT press, Cambridge, MA; 2016.
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van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2018). Workflow Patterns. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_826
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