State of the art in workflow management research and products

Abstract

In the last few years, workflow management has become a hot topic in the research community and, especially, in the commercial arena. Workflow management is multidisciplinary in nature encompassing many aspects of computing: database management, distributed client-server systems, transaction management, mobile computing, business process reengineering, integration of legacy and new applications, and heterogeneity of hardware and software. Many academic and industrial research projects are underway. Numerous successful products have been released. Standardization efforts are in progress under the auspices of the Workflow Management Coalition. As has happened in the RDBMS area with respect to some topics, in the workflow area also, some of the important real-life problems faced by customers and product developers are not being tackled by researchers. This tutorial will survey the state of the art in workflow management research and products.