A new simple formulation of workflow patterns

Abstract

The workflow patterns play a more and more important role in the development and evaluations of workflow products today. In [2] Aalst et al. released twenty patterns describing the control-flow perspective of workflow systems. With the development of the applications of the workflow patterns the number of patterns increased to forty three in their latest paper [3]. In this paper a new formulation of the workflow patterns which is based on a synchronization-based model of workflow logic and workflow semantics named Synchro-Net [1] is proposed. With the new formulation the workflow patterns can be described in a compact and consistent manner.