Implementing Workflow Systems

Workflow systems are becoming increasingly important as organisations automate their paper-based processes. Workflow systems make it possible to track processes and the responsibilities of individuals within these processes with relative ease. It is further possible to implement complex constraints including security and access control with workflow systems. Separation-of-duty is a security constraint that recently started to find its way into the workflow environment. A workflow model is presented in this paper that implements role-based access control and separation-of-duty. This model extends previous research by including semantics that can be used to implement the model. A prototype of the model has been implemented with Microsoft’s SQL Server, the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and Visual Basic.