Domain Knowledge-Based Automatic Workflow Generation

The traditional workflow design paradigm relies heavily on humans who statically specify business processes. However, such a manual design approach is not suitable for many cases: (a) Inter-agency work-flows that cross autonomous organizational boundaries require experts who possess knowledge required for defining workflows composed of services from the constituent organizations; (b) Customized workflows that require many variations make it infeasible and error-prone to predefine the complex workflow in advance. This paper presents an alternative design paradigm that allows automatic on-the-fly generation of a workflow schema. This dynamically integrated workflow composition approach utilizes conceptual ontologies of domain services (tasks) and domain integration knowledge that serves as a model for workflow integration (composition) rules. It also uses user profiles (preferences) as part of (transient) compositional rule base. We present a prototype system for "registering a new business" in the State of New Jersey that implements this automatic workflow design methodology.