• Proceedings of the Korea Database Society Conference
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• 1998.09a
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• pp.525-543
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• 1998

This paper proposes a conceptual taxonomy of architectures far workflow management systems. The systematic classification work is based on a framework for workflow architectures. The framework, consisting of generic-level, conceptual-level and implementation-level architectures, provides common architectural principles for designing a workflow management system. We define the taxonomy by considering the possibilities for centralization or distribution of data, control, and execution. That is, we take into account three criteria. How are the major components of a workflow model and system, like activities, roles, actors, and workcases, concretized in workflow architecture？ Which of the components is represented as software modules of the workflow architecture？ And how are they configured and operating in the architecture？ The workflow components might be embodied, as active (processes or threads) modules or as passive (data) modules, in the software architecture of a workflow management system. One or combinations of the components might become software modules in the software architecture. Finally, they might be centralized or distributed. The distribution of the components should be broken into three: Vertically, Horizontally and Fully distributed. Through the combination of these aspects, we can conceptually generate about 64 software Architectures for a workflow management system. That is, it should be possible to comprehend and characterize all kinds of software architectures for workflow management systems including the current existing systems as well as future systems. We believe that this taxonomy is a significant contribution because it adds clarity, completeness, and "global perspective" to workflow architectural discussions. The vocabulary suggested here includes workflow levels and aspects, allowing very different architectures to be discussed, compared, and contrasted. Added clarity is obtained because similar architectures from different vendors that used different terminology and techniques can now be seen to be identical at the higher level. Much of the complexity can be removed by thinking of workflow systems. Therefore, it is used to categorize existing workflow architectures and suggest a plethora of new workflow architectures. Finally, the taxonomy can be used for sorting out gems and stones amongst the architectures possibly generated. Thus, it might be a guideline not only for characterizing the existing workflow management systems, but also for solving the long-term and short-term architectural research issues, such as dynamic changes in workflow, transactional workflow, dynamically evolving workflow, large-scale workflow, etc., that have been proposed in the literature.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.103-112
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• 2008

This paper proposes a policy adjuster-driven Grid workflow management system for collaborative healthcare platform, which supports collaborative heart disease diagnosis applications. To select policies according to service level agreement of users and dynamic resource status, we devised a policy adjuster to handle workflow management polices and resource management policies using policy decision scheme. We implemented this new architecture with workflow management functions based on policy quorum based resource management system for providing poincare geometrycharacterized ECG analysis and virtual heart simulation service. To evaluate our proposed system, we executed a heart disease identification application in our system and compared the performance to that of the general workflow system and PQRM system under different types of SLA.

• The Journal of Information Technology and Database
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.97-108
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• 1998

This paper proposes a conceptual taxonomy of architectures for workflow management systems. The systematic classification work is based on a framework for workflow architectures. The framework, consisting of generic-level, conceptual-level and implementation-level architectures, provides common architectural principles for designing a workflow management system. We define the taxonomy by considering the possibilities for centralization or distribution of data, control, and execution. That is, we take into account three criteria. How are the major components of a workflow model and system, like activities, roles, actors, and workcases, concretized in workflow architecture. Which of the components is represented as software modules of the workflow architecture\ulcorner And how are they configured and operating in the architecture\ulcorner The workflow components might be embodied, as active (processes or threads) modules or as passive (data) modules, in the software architecture of a workflow management system. One or combinations of the components might become software modules in the software architecture. Finally, they might be centralized or distributed. The distribution of the components should be broken into three: Vertically, Horizontally and Fully distributed. Through the combination of these aspects, we can conceptually generate about 64 software Architectures for a workflow management system. That is, it should be possible to comprehend and characterize all kinds of software architectures for workflow management systems including the current existing systems as well as future systems. We believe that this taxonomy is a significant contribution because it adds clarity, completeness, and global perspective to workflow architectural discussions. The vocabulary suggested here includes workflow levels and aspects, allowing very different architectures to be discussed, compared, and contrasted. Added clarity is obtained because similar architectures from different vendors that used different terminology and techniques can now be seen to be identical at the higher level. Much of the complexity can be removed by thinking of workflow systems. Therefore, it is used to categorize existing workflow architectures and suggest a plethora of new workflow architectures. Finally, the taxonomy can be used for sorting out gems and stones amongst the architectures possibly generated. Thus, it might be a guideline not only for characterizing the existing workflow management systems, but also for solving the long-term and short-term architectural research issues, such as dynamic changes in workflow, transactional workflow, dynamically evolving workflow, large-scale workflow, etc., that have been proposed in the literature.

• CDE review
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.58-65
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• 2002

Collaborative product commerce(CPC) involves many people working together with heterogeneous and distributed software applications. For such an environment, Workflow Management System(WFMS) can be useful for coordination of people, software agents and processes. It provides diverse services including automatic work muting, project management continuous process improvement and application integration. However, there are some limitations to apply WFMS to CPC environment due to inflexibility and lack of design support facilities. This paper identifies the problems and addresses possible approaches to overcome the difficulties.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.77-84
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• 2019

Workflow management system is a system that manages the workflow model which defines the process of work in reality. We can define the workflow process by sequencing jobs which is performed by the performers. Using the workflow management system, we can also analyze the flow of the process and revise it more efficiently. Many researches are focused on how to make the workflow process model more efficiently and manage it more easily. Recently, many researches use the workflow log files which are the execution history of the workflow process model performed by the workflow management system. Ourresearch group has many interests in making useful knowledge from the workflow event logs. In this paper we use XES log files because there are many data using this format. This papersuggests what are the cardinalities of the temporal workcases and how to get them from the workflow event logs. Cardinalities of the temporal workcases are the occurrence pattern of critical elements in the workflow process. We discover instance cardinalities, activity cardinalities and organizational resource cardinalities from several XES-based workflow event logs and visualize them. The instance cardinality defines the occurrence of the workflow process instances, the activity cardinality defines the occurrence of the activities and the organizational cardinality defines the occurrence of the organizational resources. From them, we expect to get many useful knowledge such as a patterns of the control flow of the process, frequently executed events, frequently working performer and etc. In further, we even expect to predict the original process model by only using the workflow event logs.

• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.226-236
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• 2000

The best-fit workflow management system architecture for the workflows in the internet is dependent on the workflow types that should be processed in the workflow system. Since a workflow management system should accommodate various kinds of workflows requiring different workflow system architectures respectively as their best-fit workflow system architectures, it is ideal that a workflow system covers various workflow system architectures and changes its architecture according to the input workflow types. In this paper we propose a workflow system architecture that covers various workflow architectures within a single workflow system. The system changes its architecture by creating an execution object for a task in the form of an object instance and placing the created object instance to anywhere the system wants to. Performance test has been performed on the early versions of the system changing its architectures, and the results are illustrated. The results show that the distributed multiple workflow servers in the internet can contribute to not only reliable control of the distributed tasks but also enhancing total throughput of a workflow system.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.7 no.5S
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• pp.1609-1619
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• 2000

Workflow means the automation of a business process, in which documents, information or tasks are transferred among participants for business action according to a set of procedural rules, and workflow management system is a system which defines, creates and manages the execution of workflow running one or more workflow engines. In this research, necessity of standardizing current workflow systems is recognized, and problems such as interoperability of current systems, dynamic adaptation to changing business environment and lacking of assessment, management and auditing of business processes are analyzed so that the design and implementation of a workflow system is focused on to offer a solution to the problems. The system is designed and implemented to change dynamically on Run-Time the processes definition defined on Build-Time, and interoperability is enabled by developing workflow engine and related modules based on the WfMC specifications and APIs.

• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.61-70
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• 2000

The design and development of a Web-based Workflow Management System (WfMS) is described in this paper. WfMSs are employed by many organizations to manage their business processes efficiently. The goal of this research is to provide an effective management of design processes in a distributed and heterogeneous environment-an environment in which workflow participants are geographically dispersed and use different computing platforms. We identify the requirements of WfMSs for the distributed and heterogeneous environment. We present an approach to applying the Web technology to was. The developed system is composed of three main modules: Worflow Engine, Web-based clients, and Process Designer. The workflow engine is implemented in pure Java for portability to heterogeneous platforms. furthermore, the client interfaces are all programmed using applets, and thus they can be readily accessed through the Internet/intranet. The Process Designer provides a build-time function of generating process specifications. Some important functions of the developed system are explained in this paper. A prototype system has been developed and applied to design processes. The system allows effective cooperation among designers who may be geographically separated.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.205-217
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• 2009

Recently, many organizations such as companies or institutions have demanded induction of very large-scale workflow management system in order to process a large number of business-instances. Workflow vendors have focused on physical extension of workflow engines based on device-level clustering, so as to provide very large-scale workflow services. Performance improvement of workflow engine by simple physical-connection among computer systems which don't consider logical-level software architecture leads to wastes of time or cost for construction of very large-scale workflow service environment. In this paper, we propose workcase-based workflow architecture and implement a very large-scale workflow management system based on the architecture. We prove that software architectures to be applied on a workflow engine have an effect on scalability and performance through workcase response-time evaluation of our proposed system.

• IE interfaces
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.63-73
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• 1997

This paper presents requirements for workflow management systems supporting CITIS. We propose an architecture of global workflow management system which aims at supporting external workflow among different organizations rather than internal one. The architecture consists of five key elements, that is process definition language, process graphic design tool, control engine, status monitoring tool, and interface models. For each of these elements, implementation requirements are presented and its major functions are described. A key concept to the CITIS standard is the integration of disparate systems in distributed environment. This leads us to place a special emphasis on the interface models that can enhance the interoperability between externally participating workflow systems. Two interface models for the global workflow management system are explained. CORBA, the most widely accepted standard for distributed object management, can be adopted to facilitate the integration. World Wide Web can be used for the underlying platform on which information is exchanged and the status of processes instances is monitored. The workflow management system can provide a ready and easy access to and management of the data for CALS environments.