Document-Based Dynamic Workflows: Towards Flexible and Stateful Services

Task-based workflows describe a set of predefined tasks executed in a predefined sequence flow in which documents representing business objects are sent to activate tasks according to some business goal. The increasingly agile nature of business processes implies that neither the potential tasks nor their sequence flow can be defined a priori. In this context, documents may constitute the central abstraction in a business process execution while services are stateless entities. While business goals and associated business rules drive models and their executions, document content and its structure may additionally be used to determine how the document can be processed and how multiple processing tasks may be composed dynamically. This paper introduces a document-based workflow model that implements such agile business processes. The described approach relies on the use of a rule-based system as a means to capture diverse concerns such as business goals and associated rules within a uniform framework. To this end, we illustrate this approach with an electronic health record (EHR) application.