Workflow driven Process controlling for unstructured activities

In the day to day business operations of the industry depend on the technology advancements, because of heavy competition between the industries such as manufacturing, sales, software development, etc. Hence a complete control is required for these business processes. This can be achieved with workflow technology. A workflow process is a collection of processing steps also termed as tasks or activities organized to accomplish some business processes. In addition to the collection of tasks, a workflow defines the order of task invocation or conditions under which tasks must be invoked that is control flow and data flow between these tasks. Therefore this paper identifies the importance of workflow and control over these business processes for unstructured activities. Hence the complete state of the art of study was reviewed

Sistemas de workflow : analise da area e proposta de modelo

Orientador: Jacques WainerDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Matematica, Estatistica e Ciencia da ComputaçãoResumo: A presente dissertação enfoca os sistemas de workflow, que se inserem no contexto mais abrangente de software de suporte ao trabalho colaborativo. Sistemas de workflow podem ser definidos como sistemas cujo objetivo é "auxiliar as organizações na especificação, execução, monitoramento e coordenação do fluxo de trabalho em um ambiente de escritório distribuído" [Bul92]. Identificamos, através de análise da literatura da área, fatores estruturais em jogo em sistemas deste tipo, e demonstramos que as abordagens adotadas atualmente cobrem apenas parcialmente o espectro de possibilidades. Identificamos ainda omissões semânticas dos modelos ou especificações. O modelo conceitual que propomos procura tanto ampliar o poder semântico disponível nas direções apontadas pela análise, quanto corrigir os problemas estruturais detectados. Em especial, são atacados os seguintes problemas: . Propomos a ampliação do poder semântico através da oferta de um conjunto abrangente de ações básicas e elementos de sincronismo que englobam o tratamento de eventos assíncronos, atividades batch e atividades replicadas; . Apresentamos os fundamentos para um ambiente de execução fortemente orientado a dados, em que tanto objetos de sistema (como especificações de processo, p.ex.) quanto objetos de aplicação são tratados de maneira uniforme; . Tratamos o problema da alocação de executores de forma mais abrangente, permitindo a existência de atividades coletivas e o uso de estratégias de alocação diferenciadas, como balanceamento de carga de trabalho, round-robin e assim por diante. . Discutimos também os requisitos adicionais de comunicação introduzidos pela existência de atividades coletivas, cujo objetivo é o de manter a sinergia entre os participantes de cada atividade (a difusão de awareness).Abstract: A special category of collaborative systems, the Workflow Systems, are discussed. Such systems can be defined as "systems that help organizations to specify, execute, monitor, and coordinate the flow of work items within a distributed office environment" [Bul92]. We identify basic structural and semantic issues in such systems, and show that improvements can be made over current systems by offering a better coverage of both aspects. We then propose a new conceptual model that tries to fill the detected gaps both by providing a stronger, more expressive specification language and a more comprehensive execution environment. In particular, the following issues are covered: Basic actions and synchronization elements are proposed for asynchronous events, batch and replicated activities. We propose a strongly data-oriented execution environment, where both application and system objects (such as specifications) area treated in a uniform way. We present a broader solution to the agent scheduling problem, that allows one to use different allocation strategies, such as load-balancing, round robin and so on, and that lets many agents to be associated to collective activities. Collective activities give rise to special communication needs, that are treated in the broader awareness diffusion context.MestradoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

Supporting effective unexpected exception handling in workflow management systems within organizaional contexts

Tese de doutoramento em Informática (Engenharia Informática), apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2008Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) support the execution of organizational processes within organizations. Processes are modelled using high level languages specifying the sequence of tasks the organization has to perform. However, organizational processes do not have always a smooth flow conforming to any possible designed model and exceptions to the rule happen often. Organizations require flexibility to react to situations not predicted in the model. The required flexibility should be complemented with robustness to guarantee system reliability even in extreme situations. In our work, we have introduced the concept of WfMS resilience that comprises these two facets: robustness and flexibility. The main objective of our work is to increase resilience in WfMSs. From the events demanding for WfMS resilience, we focused on ad hoc effective unexpected exceptions as those for which no previous knowledge exist is the organization to derive the handling procedure and no plan can be a priori established. These exceptions usually require human intervention and problem solving activities, since the concrete situation may not be entirely understood before humans start reacting to the event. After discussing existing approaches to increase WfMS resilience, we have identified five levels of conformity. The fifth level, being the most demanding one, requires unrestricted humanistic interventions to workflow execution. In this thesis, we propose a system to support unrestricted users' interventions to the WfMS and we characterize the interventions as unstructured activities. The system has two modes of operation: it usually works under model control and changes to unstructured activities support when an exception is detected. The exception handling activities are carried out until the system is placed back into a coherent mode, where work may proceed undermodel execution control