Towards Flexible and High-Level Modeling and Enacting of Processes

Process modeling and enacting concepts are at the center of workflow management. Support for heterogeneous processes, flexibility, reuse, and distribution are great challenges for the design of the next generation process modeling languages and their enactment mechanisms. Furthermore, flexible and collaborative processes depend also on unpredictable changes and hence require human intervention. Therefore, high-level process modeling constructs are needed which allow for an easy, adequate, and participatory design of workflows. We present a process modeling language which covers these requirements and is based on object-oriented modeling and enacting techniques. In particular, we outline how tasks and task nets are specified at a high level of abstraction, how flexible and user-adaptable control and data flow specifications are supported, and how reuse of workflow models can be improved. The approach is characterized by the uniform and integrated modeling of workflow schema and instance elements as objects and by the integration of flexible rule-based techniques with the high-level constructs of task graphs. Finally, we present our object-oriented approach for the distributed enactment of workflow models: A workflow is directly enacted by task agents which may be treated as reactive components, which interact by message passing, and whose execution behavior is derived from the context-free and context-dependent behavior of the tasks defined in the workflow schema.