The Workflow Patterns Initiative started with an investigation of the control-flow capabilities of a number of state-of-the-art workflow management tools. This led to a collection of about 20 patterns, which describe typical control flow dependencies that may be encountered in workflow modelling,
problems associated with their specification, and possible realisation approaches. A number of commercial workflow products have been compared in terms of their support for the patterns, and the patterns have also been used for analysing proposed standards for web service composition such as BPEL4WS and BPML. YAWL is a powerful workflow language based on insights from the workflow patterns and from Petri nets. An environment for YAWL is currently under construction. A first version of the source code is available for download.
Dr Michael zur Muehlen maintains a web site on Workflow Research. The site contains a lot of valuable information on the topic of workflow and provides a forum for those interested in discussing various aspects of this topic.
|
