Process Enactment and Workflow

Walt Scacchi
ICS 221
17 October 2002

Workflow (Legacy)

What is computer-supported "workflow"?

(early 1980's) Office automation?
(late 1980's) Run-time execution of procedural process programs?
(1990's) Email+Groupware?
(1990's) Logical workflow using DBMS?
(2000+) Web surfing ECommerce sites, like Amazon.com?

Workflow Management Coalition

WfMC Reference Architecture (graphic)

Workflow as "implementation" vs. "specification" of a business process

Who gets to specify, refine, or redesign workflow/business processes?

Programmers consume, use, and/or produce (imperative) source code
End-users consume, use, and/or produce (declarative) content

Should workflow/process models be source code or content (or both)?

Separation of the internal representation from the external presentation form.

Web-based software process models and process enactment (workflow) environment

Problem: how to provide "process enactment" support global distributed software development projects?

Problem space (graphic)

People (agents), Places (network locales), Products (software development hypertext or linked artifacts), Programs (tools/applications), and Processes
A simple process model as a directed attributed graph (graphic)

Precedence relations (directed links/edges)
Decomposition relations
Process object types as nodes

Attributes for People, Products, and Programs for each process nodes
Attribute (instance) values as enactable workflow bindings

Process model as a semantic hypertext

Possible solution (graphic)

Provides "process-based integration"
Enables "process-directed intranets/VPNs"

Process enactment as navigational traversal of a process hypertext

Enactment as "Web surfing" a process modeled as a (semantic) hypertext

Content Management System as Workflow environment

Content management systems

Web server + database management system + file server

PHP-Nuke, Zope, etc.

Example (Zope, in Quicktime)

WSDL, SOAP, UDDI, XML?

WSFL, EBXML, etc.

Web Services Flow Language (WSDL+Routing)

see F. Leymann, D. Roller, M.-T. Schmidt, Web Services and Business Process Management, IBM Systems J., 41(2), 198-211, 2002.
Examples: Flow relationships (graphic) and global routing (graphic)

see D. Marinescu, Internet-Based Workflow Management: Toward a Semantic Web, John Wiley and Sons, Inc, 2002.

Implementation vs. specification, once again!

Process Markup Language (PML)

Grammar (specification)

Example (process fragment in PML)

PML as an open source process model specification and enactment language?

PML-based process life cycle environment (demo)

A Process Enactment Operating System (PEOS) Architecture (graphic)

Open problems:

Discovering global software development processes in open source software development projects

Distributed: Logically centralized, but physically distributed
Decentralized: logically and physicallyt distributed (e.g., peer-to-peer)

Recovering global software development processes that breakdown during enactment and must be repaired, managed, or redirected
Redesigning software development processes based on capture (event monitoring and enactment history logging), analysis (measurement), replay (simulated re-enactment), and optimization (redesign transformation rules)
Visualizing global software development processes, events, and resource bindings.

References

Advanced Workflow Management Technologies. This paper surveys current approaches to project communication and coordination, details the range of requirements across several related disciplines, and identifies various tradeoffs and trends that may effect the adoption, design, and evolution of an advanced technical workflow infrastructure. (appears in Software Process--Improvement and Practice, 4(3), 125-171, 1998.)
Supporting Software Development in Virtual Enterprises This paper presents recent developments in a distributed semantic hypertext framework called DHT that supports software development projects within virtual enterprises. We show how such hypertext functionality embodied solves the practical problems of project coordination including, collaborative sharing data in a virtual enterprise of distributed teams, integrating existing tools and environments, and enacting software processes to coordinate development activities for teams across wide-area networks. In particular, we describe how software process enactment can be achieved within a virtual enterprise without centralized mechanisms. This is when the process description is represented as a user navigable hypertext graph whose nodes associate process steps, staff roles, and associated tools with designated software products. Overall, these capabilities provide support for coordinating software development projects across a virtual enterprise of teams connected via the Internet. (appears in Journal of Digital Information, 1(4), February 1999).
Specifying Process-Oriented Hypertext for Organizational Computing. A process-oriented hypertext links information, tools, and activities into a seamless organizational web. Using such a hypertext, and process performer can enact a process by browsing, and receive guidance on how to perform the process activities, where to and relevant information, and what tools to use. The PML process modeling language provides a way for process engineers to specify process models in terms of activities, and the sequence in which they should be performed. The specifcation can be elaborated with descriptions of resources and tools required and provided by activities, and the skills necessary to carry out an activity. The resulting models are then translated into one or more process-oriented hypertexts that represent instances of the process currently being performed. PML includes features that allow the modeler to specify how the process activities should be dynamically linked to information and resource nodes at the time the process is performed. This enables processes to be described as abstract models that can be instantiated as process-oriented hypertexts in different organizational settings. (appears in Journal of Network Computing and Applications, 24(1):39-61, 2001).
Process-Driven Intranets: Life Cycle Support for Process Reengineering. This paper presents an approach to process design, the technology of process-driven intranets for electronic commerce, a case study applying this approach and technology at ONR, and a discussion of lessons learned.(appears in IEEE Internet Computing, 1(5):42-49, 1997).