Publications in 2000

Articles in Refereed Conferences:

1. Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Alistair P. Barros, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Bartek Kiepuszewski. Advanced Workflow Patterns. CoopIS, pages 18-29, 2000.
   Abstract: Conventional workflow functionality like task sequencing, split parallelism, join synchronization and iteration have proven effective for business process automation and have widespread support in current workflow products. However, newer requirements for workflows are enconntered in practice, opening grave uncertainties about the extensions for current languages. Different concepts, although outwardly appearing to be more or less the same, are based on different paradigms, have fundamentally different semantics and different levels of applicability -more specialized for modeling or more generalized for workflow engine posit. By way of developmental insight of new requirements, we define workflow patterns which are described imperatively but independently of current workflow languages. These patterns provide the basis for an in-depth comparison of 12 workflow management systems. As such, the work reported in this paper can be seen as the academic response to evaluations made by prestigious consulting companies. Typically, these evaluations hardly consider the workflow modeling language and routing capabilities and focus more on the purely technical and commercial aspects.

2. Wil M. P. van der Aalst. Workflow Verification: Finding Control-Flow Errors Using Petri-Net-Based Techniques. Business Process Management, pages 161-183, 2000.
   Abstract: Workflow management systems facilitate the everyday operation of business processes by taking care of the logistic control of work. In contrast to traditional information systems, they attempt to support frequent changes of the workflows at hand. Therefore, the need for analysis methods to verify the correctness of workflows is becoming more prominent. In this chapter we present a method based on Petri nets. This analysis method exploits the structure of the Petri net to find potential errors in the design of the workflow. Moreover, the analysis method allows for the compositional verification of workflows.