Automatic Merging of Work Items in Business Process Management Systems

摘要

Current functional requirements for Process Management Systems are often demanding accommodation of rapid changes of business processes as well as simple adoption to new business requirements. This paper identifies and distinguishes between two new ways to handle system's assisted multiple work items execution; work item merging and work item grouping. We show that traditional workflow management systems technology has limitations for automatic item merging while Harmonized Messaging Technology (HMT) (Sadiq, Orlowska, Sadiq et al., 2004b) is better positioned for such item merging behaviour. For completeness of presentation, we provide a brief introduction to the basic concepts in HMT and demonstrate how automatic merging can be specified in this environment. We conclude by investigating the impact on process related data when adopting such merging extension into process enforcement technology.