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Advancing the Concepts & Practices of Information Resources Management in Modern Organizations

A Comparative State-of-the-Art for Flexible Workflow Modeling

A Comparative State-of-the-Art for Flexible Workflow Modeling
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Author(s): Selmin Nurcan (Université Paris 1 - Panthéon - Sorbonne, France)and Awatef Hicheur (CNAM, France)
Copyright: 2005
Pages: 5
Source title: Managing Modern Organizations Through Information Technology
Source Editor(s): Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Information Resources Management Association, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59140-822-2.ch065
ISBN13: 9781616921293
EISBN13: 9781466665354

Abstract

Durring the early 90’s, workflow technologies were the only ones to offer a transversal integration capacity to the enterprise applications. However, formalisms proposed for workflow specifications were almost systematically activity oriented. Most of the usual modeling formalisms, as well as standards defined by WfMC, are all based on organizational and operational concepts. Consequently, resulting process definitions have the advantage to be easily transformable in executable code but the disadvantage of being prescriptive and rigid. More recent works highlight requirements in term of flexible and adaptive workflows, whose execution can evolve according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. This paper presents the state of the art for flexible workflow management systems and criteria for comparing them. It also introduces a conceptual framework for flexible business process modeling.

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