2. Products and Research WfMSs

3. Workflow Products (Partial List) l Action Workflow System Action Technologies Inc. http://www.actiontech.com/ l CSE/Workflow ( CSE Systems Corporation ) http://www.csesystems.com/ l Delrina FormFlow(Delrina) l DM/Workflow(Intergraph) l EPIC/WF( Computron) l FlowLogic (FlowLogic Corporation ) http://www.flowlogic.com/ l FlowMaker ( Workflow) l FlowMan(Logical Software Solutions) l FlowMark ( IBM) http://www.software.ibm.com/ ad/flowmark/ l InConcert (InConcert Inc.) http://www.inconcertsw.com/ l FloWare (BancTec Inc.) http://www.plx.com/floware/ l GroupFlow(Pavone) l InConcert(InConcert) l JetForm(Jetform)

4. Workflow Products (Partial List) l Keyflow(Keyfile) l KI Shell(UES) l Livelink Workflow(Odesta) l LinkWorks(DEC) http://www.digital.com/info/ linkworks/ l Lotus Notes(IBM/Lotus) l METEOR (Infocosm, Inc.) http://www.infocosm.com l Office.IQ workflow and document management software (Portfolio Technologies Inc.) http://www.officeiq.com/ l OmniDesk RouteBuilder (SIGMA/Wang) l OPEN/workflow (Eastman Software, Wang) http://www.eastmansoftware. com l Optix Workflow (Blueridge) l Plexus FloWare (Recognition/BancTec)

5. Workflow Products (partial list) l ViewStar System( ViewStar) l ProcessIT(NCR)-Plexus FloWare OEM l Staffware (Staffware) http://www.staffware.com/ l TeamWARE Flow (ICL/TeamWare) l Ultimus (Ultimus) http://www.ultimus1.com/ l Visual WorkFlow (FileNet) http://www.filenet.com/ l WorkMAN (Reach Software) l WorkVision(IA) WorkFlow (CSE Systems, Computer & Software Engineering) http://www.csesys.co.at/ l WorkParty (Siemens Nixdorf) http://www.sni.de/public/sni.htm l WebFlow (Workflow Management on the WWW, Cap Gemini Innovation ) http://webflow.cginn.cgs.fr:4747 /

6. Generic Workflow Product Structure Process Definition Workflow Enactment Service Applications WFM Engine Worklist Definition tool Generates WFM Engine Org. data Applications Workflow Relevant data Workflow Control data Worklist Handler Manipulate app data update use invokes interact via invokes interpreted by User Interface SOURCE: WFMC

7. FlowMark Execution Model (schematic) StAct.End OC C++ Program ICOC OC IC API IC x x < 100

8. FlowMark System Architecture System Components l FlowMark OODB server (ObjectStore-OS)* l FlowMark (FM) Server (OS Client, process navigation engine, worklist mgmt.) l FlowMark Buildtime Client (workflow process definition and animation) l FlowMark Runtime Client (process execution facility, worklist mgr., process control and container (C, REXX) API support), Administrative Utilities (Import/Export from flies, Audit trail) * being replaced by DB2 (main driver -> performance)

9. FlowMark System Architecture l Configurations: stand alone, client/server (server: OS server+ OS client+ FM server), multiple FlowMark servers on different machines (single: OS server; multiple: OS client+ FM Server, OS Client+ FM B/T, FM R/T) l Platforms: OS/2, AIX; Communications: OS/2 IPC, APPC, TCP/IP or NetBIOS l Support for Notes, NT, replacing ObjectStore by DB2

10. FlowMark Runtime System Network OSS DB RTC PECAPP RTC PECAPP PECAPP FMS RTC OSS- Object Store Server FMS- Flow Mark Server RTC - Runtime Client PEC - Program Execution Client APP - Application Program

11. Tool types (dimensions) concepts (forms, documents, tasks/activities/procedures) approach/market focus (e-mail, collaborative, imaging, document,…) modeling and specification ( coordination: graphical, petri-net, routing rules, declarative rules; model components : map, data, task; details: branching, parallel routing; designer: user, developer; toolset: support for BPM) Tool Selection

12. Tool Selection (continued) architecture (message vs. repository) system function/components (design, simulation, monitoring- user/admin, tracking/mgmt. reports, recovery, admin. tools,... reengineering) features (roles, work-list, dynamic work distribution/assignments, authorization, security, data handling, dynamic workflows/change management, exceptions, deadlines, rapid development/library/reusability, external applications…)

13. Tool Selection (continued) messaging/communication infrastructure technology (e-mail, TCP/IP, Web,……) platform (client : Unix/MS-Windows/X-open,…; server : Unix/NT/MS-Windows, database, Notes,….; DBMS: …) interfaces to other tools (open/published file formats/interfaces?) interoperatibility (applications, data access/sharing standard, workflow standards ) current client references, case studies pricing (per seat, services/software)

14. Limitations of today’s commercial workflow products - Limitations in dealing with heterogeneity and existing infrastructure - Significant demands on computing infrastructures for providers and organizers - Significant effort from design to implementation - Little support for error handling and recovery -...

15. Research Systems (partial list) l ADEPT - Next Generation Workflow Management System ( University of Ulm, DBIS Department) http://www.informatik.uni- ulm.de/dbis/f&l/forschung/workflo w/ftext-adept_e.html l ConTracts/APRICOTS http://www.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/ipvr/as/projekte/apric ots/apricots.html l CRISTAL (CERN, W. England) l Exotica (IBM) http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/e xotica/exotica_home_page.html l Income/Star http://www.aifb.uni- karlsruhe.de:80/InfoSys/ income-star.html l MENTOR (Middleware for Enterprise-wide Workflow Management) http://www-dbs.cs.uni-sb.de/ ~mentor/Welcome.html l METEOR(Multiparadigm Transactional Workflow Management System ) http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/workflow Bold => known to be active

16. Research Systems(partial list) l METUFlow (Software Research and Development Center, Metu, Turkey http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/ metuflow/ l Mobile http://www6.informatik.uni- erlangen.de/research/ wfm.html l Panta Rhei (Uni-Klu, Austria) l SWORDIES (Swiss Workflow in a Distributed Environment) http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/groups /dbtg/SWORDIES/index.html l TRAMs http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/groups/ dbtg/trams.html l TriGSflow http://www.ifs.uni- linz.ac.at/ifs/research/areas/are as.html l WASA (Muenster, G) l WIDE (Workflow on Intelligent Distributed database Environments) http://wwwis.cs.utwente.nl: 8080/~wide/wide.html l WorCOS, CodAlf (TU- Dresden,G)

17. Earlier Projects l INCA (MITL) l ASSET (BellLabs), l ObjectFlow (DEC) l Process Manager (HPLabs) Other Projects l Migrating Workflows (MCC) l Opera (ETH Switzerland) l VORTEL (Berkom, G) l DartFlow Process Management l Oz+, OzWeb (Columbia) l ICNets (Czech) l U of Aachen l Endeavor Database/ATM oriented l APRICOT (G) l TSME/DOM (GTE Lab) l Carnot (MCC) l CoACT (GMD-IPSI) Research Systems (a partial list)

18. WWW CORBA Task TM Task TM Task TM Recovery Monitor Repository Data Legacy App db Graphical Designer METEOR l Comprehensive Design/Build Env. l Automatic Code generation of Runtime System l CORBA/WWW based communication infrastructures l Predefined Task Structures with execution semantics, incl. transactional tasks l Comprehensive inter-task dependencies l Meteor’s Workflow Repository and Reuse l Error handling (Meteor’s Error model) and recovery l Standards support l Applications, research system and product

19. CODALF l Petri-net based execution model l Translation of execution graph to runtime l Syntactic and Semantic tests of execution graph l CORBA and DCE/DC++ based communication l Dynamic Mapping of Tasks and Roles via Trading Services l Predefined Structural primitives l Error Recovery at synchronization nodes Error Recovery Directory Service TraderDTMM Control module Application server Exit module Entrance module Execution graph Data Control Information Execution graph Data Control Information Workflow Object Runtime System System Services DCE/DC++ DTMM

20. MENTOR University of Saarland & Union Bank of Switzerland l Large scale WFMS in failure prone environments l State and activity charts l Transformation of design to run-time components l Distributed run-time environment l TP-monitor (Tuxedo) for reliable messaging l Workflow logs: status information & recovery l GUI based workflow monitoring contd..

21. MENTOR Architecture

22. Exotica IBM, Almaden Research Center l Based on FlowMark (IBM) l Focus on: »availability and scalability of large scale WFMS »support for mobile clients »failure handling »integration of production (FlowMark) and ad-hoc (Notes) workflows »agent-based and OO workflow »desktop integration: OLE2, VisualBasic, LotusScript contd..

23. Exotica Overview of Architecture

24. A comparison of Research WFMS features l TERMINOLOGY METEOR: workflow, task, processing entities Exotica/FloMark: process, activity, user/resource ObjectFlow: flow, step, agents representing resources l GRAPH TYPES IN MODEL METEOR and ObjectFlow allow cyclic flows. Exotica/FloMark allows only DAGs. Nesting of processes: Compound Task in METEOR, Nested Processes in Exotica and ObjectFlow.

25. A comparison of Research WFMS features (contd..) l WORKLIST CONCEPT Supported in METEOR*, Exotica and ObjectFlow. l CONTROL FLOW and DATA FLOW CONCEPTS Supported by METEOR (intertask dependency), Exotica (control & data connectors, conditions) and ObjectFlow. l SPECIFICATION LANGUAGE METEOR1: two intermediate languages: WFSL, TSL Exotica/FloMark: graphical process modeler ObjectFlow: FDL for describing flows, FML for manipulating flows

26. A comparison of Research WFMS features (contd..) l DYNAMIC FLOWS and EXCEPTION HANDLING METEOR 1 : Array of task instances and control modifiers. ObjectFlow: Iteration (multiple instances of subflow spawned until it succeeds) and fan-out; FML primitives for modifying flow procedures. l EXPLICIT MODELING OF HETEROGENEOUS TASKS METEOR: task structures

27. A comparison of Research WFMS features (contd..) l SUPPORT FOR TRANSACTIONAL AND NONTRANSACTIONAL TASKS DOM, METEOR l HOW TASKS ARE EXECUTED METEOR1 performs tasks at the Processing Entity level, which communicates with Flow Controller through an Interface. Exotica/FloMark executes tasks through a Program Execution Client. ObjectFlow performs tasks through Flow Agents.

28. A comparison of Research WFMS features (contd..) l INPUT/OUTPUT METEOR: Each task has typed input and output objects. Filters perform data reformatting/translation. Exotica/FloMark: Activities map input parameters in input containers to output parameters in output containers. ObjectFlow: Each step requires a set of data elements on which it operates - a set of data elements has a valid domain.

29. l Transactional workflows (try to) address application specific and user-defined correctness, reliability, and l Transactional workflows share the objectives of some extended/relaxed transaction models about selective relaxation of transactional properties based on (multi-) application semantics..... however, the term is likely to evolve, as it has significant appeal - see DOM and EXOTICA projects Transactional Workflow - What it is and what it is not

30. Capabilities of Research Prototypes: Example of METEOR - Supports a variety of task types: Application and User - Use of single paradigm for human involvement (WWW, Web-browser based GUI, HTML documents) - Graphical workflow design and semi-automated translation to run-time code for coordination component - Support for variety of computing infrastructures: WWW, Distributed Object Management (CORBA), Notes (Groupware) - Integrated access to (or use of) multiple web servers, various DBMSs/databases, Internet resources and capabilities (incl. Java) (contd...)

31. Capabilities of Research Prototypes (contd... ) - Variety of C/S and distributed environments; different scheduling/control strategies - Support for and use of transactions of different types: database (ACID/2-PC) transactions, DTP (transactional RPC, DE-Light), EDI, and domain- specific (e.g., HL7); customizable transactions - Ability to monitor/track/report workflows/tasks - Support for recovery and error handling - Some support for dynamic workflows (e.g., handling of task outputs)

32. A Comparison of (mostly) Research Workflow Management Systems (from CodAlf DSEJ paper)

33. References l Christoph Bussler, Stefan Jablonski, Hans Schuster. "A New Generation of Workflow-Management-Systems: beyond Taylorism with MOBILE", SIGOIS Bulletin, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 17-20, April 1996. l Ahmed K. Elmagarmid ed. "Database Transaction Models for Advanced Applications", Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1992. l GE96] H. Groiss, J. Eder. Bringing Workflow System to the Web. Institut für Informatik, Universität Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria, http://www.ifi.uni- klu.ac.at/~herb/Overview.html l IBM Research Center. Almaden, California. http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/exotica/ l N. Krishnakumar and A. Sheth, "Managing Heterogeneous Multi-system Tasks to Support Enterprise-wide Operations", Journal on Distributed and Parallel Database Systems, 3 (2), April 1995. l J. Lee and PIF Working Group. Process Interchange Format. Process Handbook Workshop, March 1996, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts

34. References (contd.) l Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab. University of Georgia, Athens, GA, http://lsdis.ca.uga.edu/workflow/ l T.W. Malone, K. Crowston, J. Lee, B. Pentland: Tools for inventing organizations: Toward a handbook of organizational processes. CCS WP #141, Sloan School WP #3562-93, May 1993, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts. l C. Mohan. Tutorial: State of the Art in Workflow Management System Research and Products. 5th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, Avignon, France, March 1996 l John A. Miller, Amit P. Sheth, Krys J. Kochut and Xuzhong Wang. CORBA- Based Run-Time Architectures for Workflow Management Systems. Journal of Database Management, Special Issue on Multidatabases, Vol. 7, 1996, (to appear) l A. Murugan. Graphical Workflow Designer. Master’s thesis, University of Georgia, 1995 l Andreas Reuter and Friedemann Schwenkreis. "ConTracts - A Low-level Mechanism for Building General-Purpose Workflow Management-Systems", Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering, Vol. 18 No.1, 1995, IEEE Computer Society.

35. References (contd.) l M. Rusinkiewicz and A. Sheth, "Specification and Execution of Transactional Workflows", in the Modern Database Systems: The Object Model, Interoperability, and Beyond, W. Kim, Ed., Addison-Wesley, 1994. l Friedemann Schwenkreis. "APRICOTS - A Prototype Implementation of a ConTract System: Management of the Control Flow and the Communication System", Proc. of the 12th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, pp. 12-21, 1993. l Friedemann Schwenkreis. "APRICOTS - a workflow programming environment", Extended abstract of work in progress, 1995. l A. Sheth, K. Kochut, J. Miller, D. Worah, S. Das, C. Lin, D. Palaniswami, J. Lynch and I. Shevchenko. "Supporting State-wide Immunization Tracking using Multi-Paradigm Workflow Technology," Proceedings of the 22nd Intl. Conf. on Very Large Databases (VLDB96), September 1996 l I. Vondrak: Interaction Coordination Nets. Technical Report of the Research Grant, Systems & Information Science Laboratory, Texas Instruments Dallas, TX, 1994 l I. Vondrak: System Simulation by Interaction Coordination Nets. European Simulation Multiconference 95, SCS International, Prague, 1995 l I. Vondrak: Distributed Interaction Coordination Nets. Technical Report of the Research Grant, Systems & Information Science Laboratory, Texas Instruments Dallas, TX, 1995

36. References (contd.) l Open Cooperative Environment (OCEAN) Dept. GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology, Germany. http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/publish/ocean/vortel/home.html l Helmut Waechter, Andreas Reuter. "The ConTract Model", Chapter 7 in [Elm92]. l Sema Group. Madrid. Spain. http://www.sema.es/projects/WIDE/ l D. Wodtke, J. Weissenfels, G. Weikum, A. Kotz Dittrich, The Mentor Project: Steps Towards Enterprise-Wide Workflow Management, IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, New Orleans, 1996