Making workflows situation aware: an ontology-driven framework for dynamic spatial systems

Business processes face constantly changing context factors like varying customer behavior or market conditions that force to adapt the underlying workflows to these evolving situations. Information overload induced by the diversity of context factors, however, leads to the inability to provide coherently modeled, comprehensible, and re-usable workflows and the failure to recognize relevant situations in time. The main goal of our research project ProFlow is to leverage situation awareness in all phases of workflow management especially focusing on dynamic spatial systems as encountered, e.g., in the domain of road traffic management. ProFlow thereby bases on a generic ontology-driven framework for situation perception and comprehension. This paper details on the corresponding ontological representations especially addressing extension points that allow developers to extend and configure our framework for their own application domains. This forms the basis for the overall system architecture, which is laid out along its prototypical implementation.

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