Development processes in engineering disciplines are highly dynamic. Since development projects cannot be planned completely in advance, the process to be executed changes at run time. We present a process management system which seamlessly integrates planning and enactment. The system manages processes at the project management level, but goes beyond the functionality of project management sys...

Product development processes are flexible and dynamic in nature. In this domain, workflows are commonly used for representing business processes in change management or for document management. The product development process itself can hardly be represented by a business process that is defined in a design phase and fixed during runtime. However, the workflow technique can be extended by conc...

This is an exploration to foretell a future in which traditional approaches for developing workflow management systems can be supplanted by new techniques and emerging technologies. This thesis recommends sets of methodologies for performing multiagent-based distributed and flexible workflow systems. Its objective is to deal with some of the present issues in the traditional workflow system fro...

Manufacturing information systems need to integrate and to enhance different information functionalities such as workflow management. Software agents can solve the problem as an additional software layer of an existing manufacturing information system. In this respect, several current research projects focus on workflow management, with the aim of an integration and coordination among plant and...

Contemporary workflow management systems are driven by explicit process models, i.e., a completely specified workflow design is required in order to enact a given workflow process. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and typically there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. Therefore, we propose a...

Workflow management systems (WfMS) should address the needs of rapidly changing business environments We have built a multi-agent based framework, JBees, which addresses these needs. We evaluate our agent based workflow system modelled using Petri nets with the proposed standards for various workflow patterns and communication patterns. The coloured Petri net model supports the workflow pattern...

Workflow management in problem solving environments (PSEs) is an emerging topic that aims to combine both data-oriented and execution-oriented views of scientific experiments, and closely integrate the processes underlying the practice of computational science with the software artifacts constituted by the PSE. This thesis presents a workflow management solution called BREW (BetteR Experiments ...

In order to support efficient workflow design, recent commercial workflow systems are providing templates of common business processes. These templates, called cases, can be modified individually or collectively into a new workflow to meet the business specification. However, little research has been done on how to manage workflow models, including issues such as model storage, model retrieval,...

Current workflow management systems still lack support for dynamic and automatic workflow adaptations. However, this functionality is a major requirement for next-generation workflow systems to provide sufficient flexibility to cope with unexpected failure events. We present the concepts and implementation of AGENTWORK, an event-based workflow management system supporting automated workflow ada...

Contemporary workflow management systems are driven by explicit process models, i.e., a completely specified workflow design is required in order to enact a given workflow process. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and typically, there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. Therefore, we propose ...