Sérgio Miguel Fernandes,

D – Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa –

Abstract:

The support provided by workflow management systems has been increasing over the years. These systems have evolved from automating individual tasks, to coordinating key organisational processes.

Research in workflow technology has been conducted both in the academic community and within business organisations. All the interest has led to the proliferation of standards proposals and to the implementation of many heterogeneous systems. One of the direct consequences is the disparity of workflow modelling languages and the difficulty that workflow systems’ developers have in choosing one language, supporting it over its many evolutions, and restraining the maintenance costs caused by the frequent changes.

In this thesis we propose a model for the core of a workflow management system that: 1) Seeks to minimise the impact caused on the system by changes to the modelling language; 2) Aims to be easily extensible with new functionalities in a language-independent fashion.

The proposed model separates the language used to model (front-end) from the language used to execute (back-end) workflows. We describe the definition and the execution modules of the workflow virtual machine that supports the back-end language. We then describe a system that was implemented based on the proposed model and we finish by performing an evaluation of the expressive qualities of the back-end language, based on the workflow patterns.

 

Date: 2006-Mar-16     Time: 13:30:00     Room: ANFITEATRO PA-3 DO EDÍFICIO DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO DO IST

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