A Data-centric Perspective for Workflow Model Management

With increasingly widespread adoption of workflow technology as a standard solution to business process management, much effort is put on designing appropriate workflow models. The reuse of existing models has been recently suggested to support more efficient workflow design, which requires the storage, search and composition of workflow models. In this paper, we propose a new framework of workflow model management from a data-centric perspective, which provides unique features lacking in existing approaches based on control flow and function description. We develop a datacentric indexing method for organizing workflow models in the repository, design a flooding algorithm for searching workflow models, and present a composition approach for integrating different workflow models to meet specific user requirements.