ARDE: a novel framework to define workflow participants

The organizational structures-based workflow participant definition, which appoints activity executors according to user´s role, department or ID, is widely used in commercial workflow management systems presently. This approach lacks of flexible mechanisms for complex participants assignment. This paper describes a novel approach (ARDE) to define workflow participants. ARDE defines participant from four facets, namely assignment, rule, duration and exception. Assignment uses an SQL-like language to define the qualification that activity participants must meet. Rule expresses a regulation to choose user(s) from all of qualified participants to undertake the task at runtime. The regulation considers the use´s context, including workload, online and vacancy, etc. Duration is the interval during which the task starts and completes. Exception represents the handling strategy when a task cannot be finished in the planned duration. In order to enforce the expression capacity, an organizational meta-model, several built-in functions and an entity outdata are introduced in this article