Towards Flexible Specification, Composition and Coordination of Workflow Activities

Abstract

We introduce the ActivityFlow specification language for flexible specification, composition, and coordination of workflow activities. The most interesting features of the ActivityFlow specification language include (1) a collection of specification mechanisms allowing workflow designers to use a uniform workflow specification interface to describe different types (i.e., ad-hoc, administrative, or production) of workflows involved in their organizational processes (an objective of this feature is to help increase the flexibility of workflow processes in accommodating changes); (2) a set of activity modeling facilities, enabling workflow designers to describe the flow of work declaratively and incrementally, allowing reasoning about correctness and security of complex workflow activities independently from their underlying implementation mechanisms; (3) an open architecture that supports user interaction as well as collaboration of workflow systems of different organizations.