Workflow Patterns

A comprehensive guide to well-known workflow patterns: recurrent, generic business process constructs, described from the control-flow, data, and resource perspectives. The study of business processes has emerged as a highly effective approach to coordinating an organization's complex service- and knowledge-based activities. The growing field of business process management (BPM) focuses on methods and tools for designing, enacting, and analyzing business processes. This volume offers a definitive guide to the use of patterns, which synthesize the wide range of approaches to modeling business processes. It provides a unique and comprehensive introduction to the well-known workflow patterns collection—recurrent, generic constructs describing common business process modeling and execution scenarios, presented in the form of problem-solution dialectics. The underlying principles of the patterns approach ensure that they are independent of any specific enabling technology, representational formalism, or modeling approach, and thus broadly applicable across the business process modeling and business process technology domains. The authors, drawing on extensive research done by the Workflow Patterns Initiative, offer a detailed introduction to the fundamentals of business process modeling and management; describe three major pattern catalogs, presented from control-flow, data, and resource perspectives; and survey related BPM patterns. The book, a companion to the authoritative Workflow Patterns website, will be an essential resource for both academics and practitioners working in business process modeling and business process management.

The 7th ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA 2009) was held on Hainan Island, China from December 2 – 4. SERA ’09 featured excellent theoretical and practical contributions in the areas of formal methods and tools, requirements engineering, software process models, communication systems and networks, software quality and evaluation, software engineering, networks and mobile computing, parallel/distributed computing, software testing, reuse and metrics, database retrieval, computer security, software architectures and modeling. Our conference officers selected the best 17 papers from those papers accepted for presentation at the conference in order to publish them in this volume. The papers were chosen based on review scores submitted by members or the program committee, and underwent further rigorous rounds of review.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Data Engineering Issues in E-Commerce and Services, DEECS 2006 held in San Francisco, California, June 2006. The book presents 15 revised full papers and 8 revised short papers organized in topical sections on e-commerce services, business processes and services, data and knowledge engineering, business models and analysis, Web services, and e-commerce systems.

This two-volume set LNCS 4803/4804 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the five confederated international conferences on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2007), Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA 2007), Ontologies, Databases and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2007), Grid computing, high performAnce and Distributed Applications (GADA 2007), and Information Security (IS 2007) held as OTM 2007 in Vilamoura, Portugal, in November 2007. The 95 revised full and 21 revised short papers presented together with 5 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 362 submissions. Corresponding with the five OTM 2007 main conferences CoopIS, ODBASE, GADA, and DOA, the papers are organized in topical sections on process analysis and semantics, process modeling, P2P, collaboration, business transactions, dependability and security, middleware and web services, aspects and development tools, mobility and distributed algorithms, frameworks, patterns, and testbeds, ontology mapping, semantic querying, ontology development, learning and text mining, annotation and metadata management, ontology applications, data and storage, networks, collaborative grid environment and scientific grid applications, scheduling, middleware, data analysis, scheduling and management, access control and authentication, intrusion detection, system and services security, network security, malicious code and code security, as well as trust and information management.

This volume brings together several perspectives on the nature of work processes in enterprises and how information systems can best support these processes. The genesis of this idea was the shared interests of the authors in how enterprises improve and change. The shared belief is that change of enterprises relates to change of work processes and the success of such changes relates to how work processes are supported by information systems. Thus, the papers in this volume address both the nature of work and the design of information systems to support work. This volume is divided into two main sections: work and workflow, and information systems. There are three papers in each section. The disciplines represented across these six papers include management, engineering, computing, and architecture. These four disciplines pursue work, workflow, and information systems from quite different perspectives - management to represent business practices and processes, engineering to represent the physical flows in the system, computing to represent the information flows, and architecture to represent human flows within and among physical spaces. Enterprises, of course, include all these types of flows.

The conference series BIR (Business Informatics Research) was established 10 years ago in Rostock as an initiative of researchers from Swedish and German universities. The objective was to create a global forum where researchers in business informatics, seniors as well as juniors, could meet, collaborate and - change ideas. Over the years BIR has matured into a series of international conferences, typically organized in the Baltic Sea region, including Norway and Iceland. A steering committee ensures the high quality of the BIR proceedings. We are very proud that this year an international and very well known editor has agreed to publish selected papers of the conference. The interest in the conference in terms of submissions and participation has steadily increased over the years. This year, we received 53 contributions among which 14 submissions were accepted as long papers and 4 as short papers. A few additional contributions were invited for presentation at the conference. The selection was carefully carried out by an International Program C- mittee. The result is a set of interesting and stimulating papers that address important issues such as knowledge management, ontologies, models, work?ow speci?cations, data bases and OLAP. The conference was opened by an invited technical talk by Dr. Klaus BrunnsteinfromTheUniversityofHamburgwhodiscussedthetopic“TheInf- mation Society on the Way to Web 3.0: Perspectives, Opportunities and Risks”, which is challenging for all of us.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2005), organized by LORIA in Nancy, France, September 5–8, 2005. This year, BPM included several innovations with respect to previous e- tions, most notably the addition of an industrial program and of co-located workshops. This was the logical result of the signi?cant (and still growing) - dustrial interest in the area and of the broadening of the research communities working on BPM topics. The interest in business process management (and in the BPM conference) was demonstrated by the quantity and quality of the paper submissions. We received over 176 contributions from 31 countries, accepting 25 of them as full papers (20 research papers and 5 industrial papers) while 17 contributions were accepted as short papers. In addition to the regular, industry, and short pres- tations invited lectures weregiven by Frank Leymannand Gustavo Alonso.This combination of research papers, industrial papers, keynotes, and workshops, all of very high quality, has shown that BPM has become a mature conference and the main venue for researchers and practitioners in this area. We would like to thank the members of the Program Committee and the reviewers for their e?orts in selecting the papers. They helped us compile an excellent scienti?c program. For the di?cult task of selecting the 25 best papers (14% acceptance rate) and 17 short papers each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers (except some out-of-scope papers).

From conception to birth is traditionally nine months. The first emails regarding the volume you now hold in your hands—or the bits you have downloaded onto your screen—are dated 11 June 2005. From conception to birth has taken over four years. Springer’s LNCS Transactions on Pattern Languages of Programming is dedicated, first and foremost, to promoting, promulgating, presenting, describing, critiquing, interrogating, and evaluating all aspects of the use of patterns in programming. In the 15 years or so since Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides’s Design Patterns became widely available, software patterns have become a highly effective means of improving the quality of programming, software engineering, system design, and development. Patterns capture the best practices of software design, making them available to everyone participating in the production of software. A key goal of the Transactions Series is to present material that is validated. Every contributed paper that appears in this volume has been reviewed by both patterns experts and domain experts, by researchers and practitioners. This reviewing process begins long before the paper is even submitted to Transactions. Every paper in the Series is first presented and critiqued at one of the Pattern Languages of Programming (PLoP) conferences held annually around the world. Prior to the conference, each submitted paper is assigned a shepherd who works with the authors to improve the paper. Based on several rounds of feedback, a paper may proceed to a writers’ workshop at the conference itself.