Expanding and refining workflow time patterns

摘要

Previous work on control flow, resource, and data patterns have had a fundamental role in delineating the corresponding dimensions of workflow languages and applications. These patterns have been used to evaluate languages' expressiveness, and have defined a basic terminology that is now shared by most workflow developers. Recently, some time patterns catalogs have been proposed, but they have some limitations with respect to the spectrum that they cover and the preciseness of the descriptions. This makes language evaluation difficult, and the fact is that most workflow languages are still very limited in their capacity to describe this dimension in spite of the important role that it plays in many business processes. In this paper we tackle both these problems by proposing an extended catalog of time patterns, and proposing a formalization for said patterns based on event calculus and state charts.