Abstract
Workflow technology has emerged as one of the leading technologies in modeling, redesigning, and executing business processes. The management of temporal aspects in the definition of a workflow process has been considered only recently in the literature. Currently available Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) and research prototypes offer a very limited support for the definition, detection, and management of temporal constraints over business processes. In this article, we propose a new advanced workflow conceptual model for expressing time constraints in business processes and we present a general technique to check different levels of temporal consistency for workflow schemata at process design time: since a time constraint can be satisfied in different ways, we propose a classification of temporal workflows according to the way time constraints are satisfied. Such classification can be used to successfully manage flexible workflows at runtime.
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Conceptual modeling of flexible temporal workflows
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