Formal Aspects of Workflow Management, Part 1: Semantics

  • Authors:

  • Munindar P. Singh

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • Formal Aspects of Workflow Management, Part 1: Semantics
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Workflows are composite activities that achieve interoperation of a variety of system and human tasks. Workflows must satisfy subtle domain-specific integrity and organizational requirements. Consequently, flexibility in execution is crucial. A promising means to achieve flexibility is through declarative specifications (Part 1) with automatic distributed scheduling techniques (Part 2). Intertask dependencies are constraints among the tasks that constitute a workflow. We propose a rigorous formal semantics for workflow computations and dependencies. Importantly, our approach uses symbolic reasoning to capture scheduler transitions. It includes an equational system that is guaranteed to yield the most general answers for scheduling, yet is sound and complete.