Mini Story Composition for Generic Workflows in Support of Disaster Management

The success and effectiveness of disaster management increasingly depend on the ability of a disaster response team to quickly and flexibly react to changes in unanticipated exceptional situations. Workflow management systems can be used to support the process organization of a disaster scenario. However, most workflow management systems are only applicable for domains with well structured and static processes. So, the highly dynamic characteristics of disaster Management cannot be handled by current workflow Management systems. In this paper, we present our approach of generic Workflows that is based on the concept of generic functions and can be combined with the word field theory. We introduce the term mini story as a semantically Logical unit for the construction of complex workflows. The elaborated concepts represent an essential part of a framework, which will be developed in the context of INDYCO project ("Integrated Dynamic Decision Support System Component for Disaster Management Systems").

I. Introduction

Workflow management systems are currently widely accepted as a necessity to provide support for complex business processes. The complexity of the processes often requires complex software. In many cases even at project start it is not entirely clear which tasks should be addressed by the workflow application. Clients often have a vague picture of the required functionality. Additionally requirements change even during software development. Business processes should address the requirements of the given application, optimize resource usage and also react to the changes and modifications.