Ongoing Research in Workflow and Process Automation

Recent growth of the workflow management product market is a clear indication that companies consider workflow technology beneficial, even in its today’s imperfect shape. Commercial Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), as sold now, are well suited to handle simple, form-based office procedures. However, more complex applications, such as production process control or telecommunication service provisioning, have requirements exceeding the capabilities of the WFMS offered today. These requirements include reliability, automatically enforced consistency (generally, transactional properties), high performance, and many others. In this chapter we present the most influential research projects, both from academia and industry, aimed at providing the workflow applications with the required support.