Survey of Workflow Management Systems

Workflow management deals with supporting business processes in organisations, it involves managing the flow of work through an organisation [1]. Workflows are a collection of coordinated tasks designed to carry out a well-defined complex process [11]. A workflow management system is a generic information system that supports modelling, execution, management and monitoring of workflows. Many different workflow management systems have been developed that focus on different application domains and provide different functionality, c.f. [2, 5, 8]. Workflow management lacks a standardised theory that provides a theoretical background for workflows like the relational algebra provides for databases [1]; despite efforts of standardisation bodies there is no consensus on the representation or conceptual model of workflow processes [14]. In this diverse and complicated landscape it is a challenge to evaluate and compare the functionality of various workflow management systems and to survey the functional requirements of workflow management systems. A number of approaches attempt to address this situation: Jablonski and Bussler [6] describe a number of essential perspectives and aspects of a comprehensive workflow management functionality; they provide a structure in the complex environment of workflows. Van der Aalst et al. [2] and Russell et al. [13] systematically analyse available functionality in existing workflow management systems, and categorise these in a number of workflow patterns; these patterns are devoid of implementation issues and form a qualitative standard against which existing workflow management systems can be compared. In Petkov et al. [12] we describe an integrated view on these aspects: we indicate what comprises each aspect, how each aspect can be modelled, and what quality indicators exist to assess its support in workflow management systems. In this paper we build upon this earlier work to evaluate the functionality of workflow management systems per aspect.