Flexible and customizable workflow execution on the www

Abstract

Because of the common concerns between various disciplines, trends are moving towards overlap and convergence of requirements. However, these communities have yet to identify the union of cross-discipline requirements for a supporting technical infrastructure addressing the level of flexibility and customization required in these real-world settings. This thesis identifies a shared set of core requirements between the process, workflow, and groupware disciplines, examines the current approaches to communication and coordination requirements in the face of ubiquitous network support, and provides contributions in each of the converging fields. In particular, this thesis demonstrates techniques which enable a workflow process infrastructure to better address the distribution of workflow processes and people, bi-directional integration with external tools, customization and reuse of workflow objects and their presentations, dynamic change in the routing of artifacts and control of activities, and support for multiple stakeholders with varying degrees of technical skill. This is accomplished by augmenting the strengths of the World Wide Web with control and coordination infrastructure using a new set of implementation technologies and approaches. These approaches include maintaining several layered object models encompassing interchangeable workflow services at different levels of abstraction, implementing the support architecture as a set of highly componentized, lightweight, concurrent elements, supporting event-based communication between layers and objects including user interface components, allowing customizable distribution policies including design and dissemination of workflow components using standard Internet and WWW protocols, and providing access to internal workflow objects through open application programmer interfaces (APIs) and extensions to the common WWW mechanisms using multiple programming languages. Most importantly, this thesis demonstrates that a workflow infrastructure can concurrently support the requirements of distribution, integration, customization and reuse, dynamic change, and multiple stakeholders on the WWW using the implementation technologies and approaches described above. The benefits of doing so ensure remote project members work together toward common goals by understanding the context of their work assignments, have access to project status information, and coordinate the use of artifacts and tools. Projects undertaken over the WWW can evaluate status and track progress by allowing remote access and changes to the specification of activities and their dependencies, comparison of actual to planned progress, and correction of deviations. The claims made in this thesis are validated by examining the characteristics of domain specific workflow solutions built on top of a customizable and flexible workflow infrastructure research prototype in order to understand the limits of and populate the design space. This dissertation concludes by positioning this work within the context of further shared requirements across the process, groupware, and workflow fields. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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