Data Flow Modeling and Verification in Business Process Management

Workflow technology has become a standard solution to managing increasingly complex business processes. Successful business process management depends on effective workflow modeling tools. Recently, researchers have developed a variety of workflow models, focusing mainly on the control and coordination of tasks, i.e. the control flow perspective. However, most of these workflow models found in the literature have paid little attention to the data flow perspective. In this paper, we investigate the data flow issues and propose a data flow modeling approach in the context of business process management. Our research objective is to develop a data flow modeling tool that supports data flow verification in workflow systems. Our contributions include also the classification of data flow operations and data flow anomalies.