Towards Context-aware Workflows

Context-aware applications adapt their behavior based on changes of the physical world, which is often obtained with a huge amount of sensors. Thus, the development of such applications is cumbersome, in particular the implementation of their often complex control flow. To ease the development of context-aware applications we present the concept of context-aware workflows. Thereafter we present an implementation of these concepts based on a standard workflow language. Context-aware workflows are not only interesting for the development of context-aware applications, but also enable workflow technology to be applied in new domains that are process oriented and yet not supported by workflow systems like production processes in the manufacturing industry. The concept of context-aware workflows is a first approach that enables modeling and execution of technical production processes with workflow systems normally used for business processes.