Policies in a resource manager of workflow systems: modeling, enforcement and management

Summary form only given. We are interested in Workflow Management Systems (WFMS), and particularly, in Resource Management (RM) of WFMS. A WFMS consists of coordinating executions of multiple activities, instructing who (resource) do what (activity) and when. The "when" part is taken care of by the workflow engine which orders the executions of activities based on a process definition. The "who" part is handled by the resource manager that aims at finding suitable resources at the run-time for the accomplishment of an activity as the engine steps through the process definition. Resources of different kinds (human and material, for example) constitute the information system of our interest, their management consists of resource modeling and effective allocation upon users' requests. Since resource allocation needs to follow certain general guidelines (authority, security, for example)-no matter who or what application issues requests: so those general guidelines are better considered as part of the resources' semantics. That is the reason why we are interested in resource policy management in RM. Resource policies are general guidelines every individual resource allocation must observe. They differ from process specific policies which are only applied to a particular process. The policy manager is a module within the resource manager, responsible for efficiently managing a (potentially large) set of policies and enforcing them in resource allocation. We propose to enforce policies by query rewriting.