ePERT: Extending PERT for Workflow Management System

Workkows management systems support the deenition and execution of business processes. While business process reeingeneering tools use time information to simulate and optimize processes, the management of time is hardly supported in workkow systems. We introduce a concept for time management for workkow systems. It consists of calculating internal deadlines for all activities within a workkow, checking time constraints and monitoring time at run-time. For the calculation of internal deadlines we extend the net-diagram technique PERT to support the structures usually found in workkows. At run-time this time information is used to pro-acticely avoid time errors and reactively resolve time failures. The concept has been implemented in our prototype workkow management system Panta Rhei.