Workflow patterns put into context

In his paper “Approaches to Modeling Business Processes. A Critical Analysis of BPMN, Workflow Patterns and YAWL”, Egon Börger criticizes the work of the Workflow Patterns Initiative in a rather provocative manner. Although the workflow patterns and YAWL are well established and frequently used, Börger seems to misunderstand the goals and contributions of the Workflow Patterns Initiative. Therefore, we put the workflow patterns and YAWL in their historic context. Moreover, we address some of the criticism of Börger by pointing out the real purpose of the workflow patterns and their relationship to formal languages (Petri nets) and real-life WFM/BPM systems.

[1]  Martin Fowler,et al.  Analysis patterns - reusable object models , 1996, Addison-Wesley series in object-oriented software engineering.

[2]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency II, Special Issue on Concurrency in Process-Aware Information Systems , 2009, Trans. Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency.

[3]  Moe Thandar Wynn,et al.  Workflow simulation for operational decision support , 2009, Data Knowl. Eng..

[4]  Bobby Woolf,et al.  Enterprise Integration Patterns , 2003 .

[5]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Exception Patterns , 2006, CAiSE.

[6]  Gregor Hohpe,et al.  Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions , 2003 .

[7]  W.M.P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow management: Models, methods and systems (in Dutch, second revised print) , 1997 .

[8]  Max Jacobson,et al.  A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction , 1981 .

[9]  BörgerEgon Approaches to modeling business processes , 2012 .

[10]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Process Mining - Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes , 2011 .

[11]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Patterns-based evaluation of open source BPM systems: The cases of jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark , 2008, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[12]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Patterns: On the Expressive Power of (Petri-net-based) Workflow Languages. , 2002 .

[13]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Advanced Workflow Patterns , 2000, CoopIS.

[14]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  Workflow Management Models , Methods , and Systems , 2002 .

[15]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Resource Patterns: Identification, Representation and Tool Support , 2005, CAiSE.

[16]  Egon Börger Modeling Workflow Patterns from First Principles , 2007, ER.

[17]  Egon Börger,et al.  Approaches to modeling business processes: a critical analysis of BPMN, workflow patterns and YAWL , 2011, Software & Systems Modeling.

[18]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Patterns , 2004, Distributed and Parallel Databases.

[19]  Mathias Weske,et al.  A Look Around the Corner: The Pi-Calculus , 2009, Trans. Petri Nets Other Model. Concurr..

[20]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Data Patterns: Identification, Representation and Tool Support , 2005, ER.

[21]  Bernhard Thalheim,et al.  Conceptual Modeling - ER 2007 , 2007, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[22]  Nick Russell,et al.  Foundations of Process-Aware Information Systems , 2007 .

[23]  Ralph Johnson,et al.  design patterns elements of reusable object oriented software , 2019 .