A Conceptual Framework for Smart Workflow Management

Workflow technology is an effective means of modeling and management of complex interacting business processes and is now being employed in other diversified domains. Although the workflow technology is already quite mature and commercial workflow management products are readily available, it has been observed that the technology lacks certain context related components and concepts when applied to domains like e-commerce, mobile and pervasive computing. The context-aware or smart workflows are those that operate as per context information gathered from environment or domain knowledge. In order to make workflow management context-aware, extensions and modifications are required in existing architectures and standards of workflow management systems. This paper describes a framework for designing and managing context-aware workflows that encompasses different aspects of context change. It indicates the changes and extensions required in the current technology for smooth integration of context in workflows to enable their smart execution. We present a simplified technique of workflow representation with the introduction of context-activity architecture as the basis of our framework.