Abstract
Business processes require the coordinated execution of simple activities (tasks) by human or automatic executors (agents). Business processes are described in terms of a workflow and their execution is supported by suitable software systems named workflow management systems (WfMS). Several conceptual models for the formal definition of workflows have been defined in the literature. However, a detailed conceptual model enabling the process designer to specify temporal constraints for the activities in a workflow is still lacking.
By this paper we enrich a previously published conceptual model of workflows by adding the definition of three kinds of constraints: task constraints, related to the starting timestamp and to the duration of one single task; schedule-task constraints, related to the time elapsed between the completion of a task and the start of the subsequent task by the entitled agent; inter-task constraints, related to the time elapsed between the execution of a task and of one subsequent task of its. The enriched model enables a WfMS to manage soft real-time processes.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bettini, C., Wang, X., Jajodia, S.: Temporal Reasoning in Workflow Systems. Distributed and Parallel Databases 11(3), 269–306 (2002)
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Pernici, B., Pozzi, G.: Conceptual Modeling of Workflows. In: Papazoglou, M.P. (ed.) ER 1995 and OOER 1995. LNCS, vol. 1021, pp. 341–354. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Pernici, B., Pozzi, G.: Workflow Evolution. Data and Knowledge Engineering 24(3), 211–238 (1998)
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Paraboschi, S., Pozzi, G.: Specification and Implementation of Exceptions in Workflow Management Systems. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 24(3), 405–451 (1999)
Combi, C., Pozzi, G.: HMAP – A Temporal Data Model Managing Intervals with Different Granularities and Indeterminacy from Natural Language Sentences. VLDB Journal 9(4), 294–311 (2001)
Eder, J., Panagos, E., Rabinovich, M.: Time Constraints in Workflow Systems. In: Int. Conf. on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, pp. 286–300. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Eder, J., Panagos, E., Pozewaunig, H., Rabinovich, M.: Time Management in Workflow Systems. In: Int. Conf. on Business Information Systems, pp. 265–280. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Eder, J., Gruber, W., Panagos, E.: Temporal Modeling of Workflows with Conditional Execution Paths, Database and Expert Systems Applications. In: Int. Conf., pp. 243–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Goralwalla, I., Leontiev, Y., Özsu, M.T., Szafron, D., Combi, C.: Temporal Granularity: Completing the Puzzle. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems 16(1), 41–63 (2001)
Marjanovic, O., Orlowska, M.E.: On Modeling and Verification of Temporal Constraints in Production Workflows. Knowledge and Information Systems 1(2), 157–192 (1999)
Pressman, R.: Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 5th edn. McGraw-Hill, New York (2001)
The WorkFlow Management Coalition, http://www.wfmc.org
Sadiq, S.W., Marjanovic, O., Orlowska, M.E.: Managing Change and Time in Dynamic Workflow Processes. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 9(1-2), 93–116 (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Combi, C., Pozzi, G. (2003). Temporal Conceptual Modelling of Workflows. In: Song, IY., Liddle, S.W., Ling, TW., Scheuermann, P. (eds) Conceptual Modeling - ER 2003. ER 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2813. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39648-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39648-2_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20299-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39648-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive