Enhancement of Workflow Flexibility by Composing Activities at Run-time

摘要

Flexibility has recently grown to be one of the major research topics in the area of workflow management. A workflow system that supports flexible processes will benefit organizations more. In this paper, we present a workflow model offering flexibility by enabling activities to be composed automatically or manually at run-time. Our model uses selection constraints and composition constraints to guide end users to build valid workflow specifications. As an application of this model, we outline the architecture of our multi-agent based workflow management system, of which model agents play the role to complete workflow specifications according to run-time information of instances. We put forward an important algorithm related to the model agent, which is to compose activities into a valid sub-process with the shortest critical path.