Workflow Specification in TRAMs

Adequate methods to workflow system design allow for all relevant aspects of workflows, such as organizational, structural, and behavioral aspects. Additionally, since in most organizations basic components of workflow systems already exist, workflow system development should support a component-oriented way of integrating existing parts into (new) workflow systems. In this paper, we present the TRAMs-approach towards workflow specification. This approach supports the specification of the aforementioned functionalasp ects of workflows. The basic modeling construct in TRAMs are workflow types, which can either be complex or atomic (activity types). Complex workflow types define a set of subworkflows, and control and data flows among the subworkflows. Organizational entities and relationships can be defined and related to activities through task assignment rules. TRAMs-specifications are modular, and their parts are therefore more likely to be reusable in other specifications. Finally, specifications are activity-centric (in contrast to state-centric approaches) which allows a more intuitive way of modeling.