Author:
Thomas Bauer
Affiliation:
Hochschule Neu-Ulm, University of Applied Sciences, Wileystr. 1, 89231 Neu-Ulm, Germany
Keyword(s):
Business Process, Flexibility, Control Flow, Sequence, Time, Workflow Engine.
Abstract:
At business processes (BP), activities are usually considered as atomic units. This results in unnecessary restrictions, e.g. when modelling sequences of activities. Here, flexibility can be increased by allowing that a sequence edge refers to the start and to the end events of their source and target activity arbitrarily. This allows additional execution orders at the runtime of the BP, i.e. the end users have more flexibility at BP execution. Nevertheless, we respect all modelled control flow conditions, as well as time constraints defined between activities (e.g. minimum time intervals). A process engine requires a formal execution semantics, to be able to control such a BP automatically. Therefore, in this paper, we develop corresponding execution rules. Furthermore, we present measures that enable the process engine to delay and to speed up the start and the completion of activities in order to respect the modelled time constraints.