Abstract
Workflows consist of computer-supported, data-intensive activities which involve multiple “steps” of processing; Workflow management is an emerging and challenging field, offering opportunities for exporting database technology beyond its classical boundaries. In particular, active rules supported by many database systems appear as an ideal paradigm for expressing the control and data flows between processing steps, and consequently they are being proposed as a suitable implementation mechanism for Workflow managers. On the other end, active rules appear a too low level description of Workflows to be presented to Workflow system users.
In this paper, we propose automatic derivation techniques of active rules from conceptual Workflow specifications. In addition, the paper includes a full collection of case-independent rules at the basis of any Workflow enactment. The objective and challenge of this research is to give a precise operational semantics to Workflow enactment through active rules, thereby addressing an issue which is still lacking concrete and precise proposals.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Attie P., Singh M., Sheth A., Rusinkiewicz M., “Specifying and Enforcing Intertask Dependencies”, Proc. 19th VLDB Conf., Dublin, Ireland, 1993.
Bandinelli S., Fuggetta A., Ghezzi C., “Software Process Model Evolution in the SPADE Environment”, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 19, n. 12, pp.1128–1144, December 1993.
Baralis E., Ceri S., Paraboschi S., “Modularization Techniques in Active Rule Design”, Tech. Report IDEA.WP.003.01, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy, Dec. 1994.
Bracchi G., Pernici B., “The Design Requirements of Office Systems”, ACM Trans. on Office Information Systems, 2(2), April 1984.
Bussler C., Jablonski S., “Implementing Agent Coordination for Workflow Management Systems Using Active Database Systems”, Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Research Issues in Data Engineering (RIDE-ADS '94), Houston, Texas, February 1994.
Casati F., Ceri S., Pernici B., Pozzi G., “Conceptual Modeling of Workflows”, Proc. of the Object-Oriented and Entity-Relationship Conf., Gold Coast, Australia, 1995.
Casati F., Ceri S., Pernici B., Pozzi G., Conceptual Modeling of Workflows, Internal Report n. 95.018, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy, 1995. The document can also be retrieved by ftp://xerox.elet.polimi.it/pub/papers/WF/InternalReport95_018.ps.
Ceri S., Widom J., “Deriving Production Rules for Constraint Maintenance”, Proc. 16th VLDB Conf., Brisbane, Australia, 1990.
Ceri S., Fraternali P., Paraboschi S., Tanca L., “Active Rule Management in Chimera”, in [25].
Dayal U., Hsu M., Ladin R., “Organizing Long-running Activities with Triggers and Transactions”, Proc. ACM SIGMOD, 1990.
Ellis C., Nutt G., “Modeling and Enactment of Workflow Systems”, in Application and Theory of Petri Nets, M. Ajmone Marsan Ed., Lecture Notes in Computer Science 691, New York: Springer Verlag, 1993.
Ellis S., Keddara K. and Rozenberg G., “Dynamic Change within Workflow Systems”, ACM Conf. on Organizational Computing Systems (COOCS 95), 1995.
Forst A., Kuhn E., Bukhres O., “General Purpose Workflow Languages”, Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 3, n. 2, April 1995.
Fraternali P., Tanca, L.: “A Toolkit for the Design of Active Database Semantics”, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Technical Report 93-078, 1993.
Georgakopoulos D., Hornick M., Sheth A., “An Overview of Workflow Management: from Process Modeling to Workflow Automation Infrastructure”, Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 3, n. 2, April 1995.
Gonzales-Quel A., Gonzales S., Perez M., “IDEA Technology Assessment Based on Workflow Applications. The Royal Life Application”, IDEA Rep. IDEA.DE.21S.001.01, November 1994.
Hewlett Packard Company, “Workflow Module Programming Guide”, Palo Alto, Ca, July 1994.
Hsu M. (ed.), Special Issue on Worflow and Extended Transaction Systems, Data Engineering Bulletin, 16(2), June 1993.
Kappel G., Lang P., Rausch-Schott S., Retschitzegger W., “Workflow Management Based on Objects, Rules and Roles”, Data Engineering, vol. 18, n. 1, March 1995.
Krishnakumar N., Sheth A., “Managing Heterogeneous Multi-system Tasks to Support Enterprise-wide Operations”, Distributed and Parallel Databases, vol. 3, n. 2, April 1995.
Paton N.W., Diaz O., Williams M., Campin J., Dinn A., and Jaime A: “Dimensions of Active Behaviour”, in Rules in Database Systems, Norman W. Paton and M. Howard Williams (Eds), Springer-Verlag, 1993.
Rusinkiewicz M., Sheth A., “Specification and Execution of Transaction Workflows”, in Modern Database Systems: the Object Model, Interoperability, and beyond, Kim W. (ed.), Addison-Wesley, 1994.
Sheth A., Rusinkiewicz M., “On Transactional Workflows”, Data Engineering Bulletin, 16(2), June 1993.
Ullman, J.D., “Principles of Database and Knowledge Base Systems”, 2 Volumes, Computer Science Press, Rockville, Maryland, 1989.
Widom J., Ceri S., “Active Database Systems”, Morgan-Kaufmann, San Mateo, Ca, 1995.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Pernici, B., Pozzi, G. (1996). Deriving active rules for workflow enactment. In: Wagner, R.R., Thoma, H. (eds) Database and Expert Systems Applications. DEXA 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1134. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0034673
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0034673
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61656-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70651-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive