Blended Workflow

The Blended Workflow project fuses an activity-based approach with a goal-based approach. Its environment allows end users to follow a standard pre-defined behaviour when performing their work (following an activity-based view), but to deviate whenever an unexpected situation occurs (following a goal-based view). The Blended Workflow engine is responsible to keep the two different views of any workflow instance synchronised so that end users can decide at any time which view to use to perform their work.

Protoptype

We are developping a prototype that includes a designer of well-formed blended workflow models and a blended workflow execution engine. The code is publicly available in a github repository: https://github.com/socialsoftware/blended-workflow.

A first prototype of a blended workflow execution engine was developed on top of the YAWL engine and it is available in tag v1.0. A short demo of the first prototype is available here.

On Going Work

• Definition of a sound method to create well-formed Blended Workflow specifications.
• The formal proof of the consistent execution of a well-formed Blended Workflow specification.
• The implemention of an integrated designer and executor.

Research Opportunities

In the context of the Blended Workflow project, we have open full-time research opportunities for PhD and MSc studies, and part-time internships for students that want to develop research skills by working in an exciting and innovative project. If you are interested, please, contact the project coordinator.

The internships have a 30 hours duration and to apply for it a minimum set of competences is required: The students must master the concepts and technologies taught in the Software Engineering course.

Both, thesis and internships, address several existing open problems. The following, are some examples, but contact us to receive more detailed information about the current project status and needs:

• Blended workflow engine
• Introduce the organisational perspective and the correspond work assigments to the Blended Workflow designer and executor
• Introduce the access control perspective to the Blended Workflow designer and executor
• Study several dimensions of flexibility in the Blended Workflow executor
• Develop a module for workflow logging and allow to replay it by using a event source architecture
• User interface development
• Define and implement a user friendly interface for the modeling of a blended workflow specification
• Define and design a user friend interface for the integrated execution of a blended workflow instance, according to both views: activity and goal

Publications

• António Rito Silva and Vicente García-Díaz. Integrating activity- and goal-based workflows: a data model based design method. In 4th Workshop on Data- & Artifact-centric BPM (DAB’15). August 2015, 13th Conference on Business Process Management, Innsbruck, Austria. LNBIP
• Davide Passinhas, Michael Adams, Bernardo Oliveira Pinto, Ricardo Costa, António Rito Silva and Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede. Blended Workflow Engine. IN Proceedings of the Demonstration Track of the 10th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2012). September 2012, Tallinn, Estonia. N. Lohmann, S. Moser (Eds): BPM Demos 2012, Vol. 940, pp. 23-28, 2012. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. urn:nbn:de:0074-940-9
• António Rito Silva. A Blended Workflow Approach. In Business Process Design (BPD2011). August 2011, Clermont-Ferrand, France. F. Daniel et al. (Eds.): BPM 2011 Workshops, Part I, LNBIP 99, pp. 25-36, 2012. Springer.
• Bernardo Pinto and António Rito Silva. An Architecture for a Blended Workflow Engine: Integrating an Activity-Based Perspective with a Goal-Based Perspective. In Second International Workshop on Traceability and Compliance of Semi-Structured Processes (TC4SP2011) . August 2011, Clermont-Ferrand, France. F. Daniel et al. (Eds.): BPM 2011 Workshops, Part II, LNBIP 100, pp. 382–393, 2012. Springer.

Thesis

• Davide Passinhas. Blended Workflow: A Modular Architecture to Use an External Workflow Management System, Information Systems and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Lisbon, October 2012.
• Bernardo Pinto. An Architecture for a Blended Workflow System. MSc Thesis. Informatics and Computer Engineering - Technical University of Lisbon. November 2011.

Researchers

• António Rito Silva
• Frederico Madeira (MSc on Access Control Verification)
• Guilherme Ramos (MSc on Resource Management)
• Artur Oliveira (MSc on Monitorization)

Past Reserachers

• Vicente García-Díaz (visiting from University of Oviedo @ designer)
• Bernardo Pinto (MSc Thesis on a Blended Workflow Engine)
• David Passinhas (MSc Thesis on YAWL Integration)