Human resource constraints driven virtual workflow specification

A virtual workflow specification is a formal description of business process in the real world and whose execution is done in a virtual organisation. Workflows are activities that involve the coordinated execution of multy tasks performed by different processing entities. Among the processing entities are human resources. These latter belong to an organisation or in a virtual organisation and are bound by strict constraints. Defining a correct execution of a workflow is very complex and error-prone, specially when dealing with human resources. Only a few works have addressed this problem and proposed some approaches for the verification of the correct execution of a workflow. These works do not tackel, in our known, the human resource issue. In this paper, we first identify the resource constraints in a workflow spacification. Then we prove an innovative approach to the checking of the human resource consistency in the virtual workflow specification. The formal description is done in the Raise Specification Language (RSL). The work reported in this paper provides a theoritical foundation for virtual workflow modeling and analysis in virtual workflow management.