Model-Driven Development of Human Tasks for Workflows

In order to increase efficiency, enterprises support their business processes by information technology (IT). The majority of business processes requires human interaction. Human interaction results in a growing complexity of the supporting IT. Model-driven approaches to software development are a promising solution to be able to cope with this complexity. According to these approaches, all aspects of the developed software are captured in models and automatically transformed to the source code of the desired platform. Currently there remains a lack of precise models for capturing necessary aspects of human interaction. Hence, a large amount of manual development and configuration work has to be done to enable humans to perform a task within IT supported business processes. In this article we demonstrate an approach to model human tasks for business processes and propose an extension to service-oriented architecture (SOA) to support the execution of human tasks. A case study fortifies the applicability of this approach.