TSM: A Design Pattern to Make Ad-hoc BPMs Easy and Inexpensive in Workflow-aware MISs

Authors: Haitao Yang

Abstract:

Despite so many years- development, the mainstream of workflow solutions from IT industries has not made ad-hoc workflow-support easy or inexpensive in MIS. Moreover, most of academic approaches tend to make their resulted BPM (Business Process Management) more complex and clumsy since they used to necessitate modeling workflow. To cope well with various ad-hoc or casual requirements on workflows while still keeping things simple and inexpensive, the author puts forth first the TSM design pattern that can provide a flexible workflow control while minimizing demand of predefinitions and modeling workflow, which introduces a generic approach for building BPM in workflow-aware MISs (Management Information Systems) with low development and running expenses.

Keywords: Ad-hoc workflow, BPM, Design pattern, TSM

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1333792

References:

[1] W. M. P. van der Aalst, and A. H. M. ter Hofstede, "Workflow patterns initiative," http://www.workflowpatterns.com/
[2] S. Carlsen, J. Krogstie, and O. I. Lindland, "Evaluating flexible workflow systems," in Proc. 30th Hawaii Int'l Conf. on System Sciences, 1997, vol.2, pp. 230-239. DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.1997.665502
[3] C. Hagen, and G. Alonso, "Exception handling in workflow management systems," IEEE Trans. Software Eng., vol. 26, no. 10, pp. 943-958.
[4] F. Casati, S. Ceri, S. Paraboschi, and G. Pozzi, "Specification and implementation of exceptions in workflow management systems," ACM Trans. Database Syst., vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 405-451.
[5] Staffware Company, "Workflow patterns according to Staffware," http://www.workflowpatterns.com/vendors/documentation/vc_staffware. pdf
[6] R. Bastos, and D. Ruiz, "Towards an approach to model business processes using workflow modeling techniques in production systems," in Proc. 34th Annual Hawaii Int'l Conf. on System Sciences, CA: IEEE Press, 2001, vol. 9, pp. 9036-9045. DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2001.927231
[7] W. Barbara, S. Shazia, and R. Manfred, "Beyond rigidity-dynamic process lifecycle support: a survey on dynamic changes in process-aware information systems," Computer Science - Research and Development, 2009, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 47-65.
[8] M. Adams, D. Edmond, and A. H. M. ter Hofstede, "The application of activity theory to dynamic workflow adaptation issues," in proc. 7th Pacific Asia Conf. on Inf. Syst., Adelaide, South Australia, 2003, pp. 1836-1852.
[9] A. Borgida, and T. Murata, "Tolerating exceptions in workflows: a unified framework for data and processes," in Int'l Joint Conf. on Work Activities, Coordination and Collaboration (WACC'99), pp. 59-68. San Francisco, CA: ACM Press, 1999.
[10] P. Wohed, A. H. M. ter Hofstede, N. Russell, B. Andersson, and W. M. P. van der Aalst, "On the maturity of open source BPM systems," BPTrends, 2009, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 1-11.
[11] J. Xinhua, and Z. Lina, "Inter-operation of distributed workflow engine on asynchronous web services," in proc. 3rd Int'l Conf. on Semantics, Knowledge and Grid, 2007, pp. 590-591.
[12] Z. Marco, W. M. P. van der Aalst, R. Nick, L. Philipp, and W. Hannes, "An analysis of windows workflow's control-flow expressiveness," in proc. 7th IEEE European Conf. on Web Services, 2009, pp. 200-209.
[13] N. Y. Chow, "How to calculate ROI for your BPM Project", 2010. http://www.bpmenterprise.com/content/c060529a.asp
[14] C. Mark, and P. Paul, "Business process management (BPM) Definition and Solutions," 2007, http://www.cio.com/article/106609/Business_Process_Management_BP M_Definition_and_Solutions?page=5