Workflow Patterns (original) (raw)

Definition

Differences in features supported by the various contemporary commercial workflow management systems point to different insights of suitability and different levels of expressive power. One way to characterize these differences and to support modelers in designing nontrivial workflows is to use a patterns-based approach. Requirements for workflow languages can be indicated through workflow patterns, i.e., frequently recurring structures in processes that need support from some process-aware information system. The Workflow Patterns Initiative [6] aims at the systematic identification of workflow requirements in the form of patterns.

The Workflow Patterns Initiative resulted in various collections of patterns. The initial 20 control-flow patterns have been extended with additional control-flow patterns and patterns for other perspectives such as the resource, data, and exception handling perspectives. All of these patterns have been used to evaluate different systems in a...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
    W. M. P. van der Aalst

Authors

  1. W. M. P. van der Aalst
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Correspondence toW. M. P. van der Aalst .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA
    Ling Liu
  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada
    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy
    Barbara Pernici

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van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2018). Workflow Patterns. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9\_826

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