Business System

Time Management in Work ow Systems
AT&T Labs { Research Florham Park, NJ 07932
hans@research.att.com

Johann Eder

AT&T Labs { Research Florham Park, NJ 07932

Euthimios Panagos

thimios@research.att.com

Department of Informatics Systems AT&T Labs { Research University of Klagenfurt, Austria Florham Park, NJ 07932
hepo@ifi.uni-klu.ac.at misha@research.att.com

Heinz Pozewaunig

Michael Rabinovich

Management of work ow processes is more than just enactment of process activities according to business rules. Time management functionality should be provided to control the lifecycle of processes. Time management should address planning of work ow executions in time, provide various estimates about activity execution durations, avoid violations of deadlines assigned to activities and the entire process, and react to deadline violations when they occur. In this paper, we describe how time information can be captured in the work ow de nition, and we propose a technique for calculating internal activity deadlines with the goal to meet the overall deadlines during process execution.

Abstract

1 Introduction
Time plays an important role in the management of business processes. For instance, business process re-engineering projects typically try to reduce turnaround times and improve process execution duration estimates in order to improve competitiveness. In addition, many business processes have time-related restrictions, including bounded execution durations for
eder@ifi.uni-klu.ac.at

On leave from Department of Informatics Systems, University of Klagenfurt, Austria,

1

activities and sub-processes and absolute deadlines associated with activities and sub-processes. Consequently, time management should be part of the core management functionality provided by work ow systems to control the lifecycle of business processes. Even though existing work ow management systems o er sophisticated modeling tools to specify and analyze work ows,... [continues]

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