Towards flexible distributed real-time monitoring and managing of workflows

The unpredictability of business processes requires workflow systems to support monitoring functions with the ability to flexibly adapt to the changing environment, in which the activities of the workflow are distributed and the status of the process has to be presented in real-time fashion. In this context flexibility refers to the following main requirements: (a) adaptation to changes of the different dimensions of the workflow (process flows, resources and specific cases) (b) context awareness of the monitoring systems such that the graphical user interface displays information depending on the situation of the different workflow entities. Previous approaches to workflow monitoring focused on automated routing, distributed monitoring or various repetitive requests to the workflow system. These approaches did neither consider real-time data exchange from user interface clients to the server nor the separation of the process logic from the representational logic of the graphical user interface. In this paper flexible distributed real-time workflow monitoring is realized by: (1) middleware components supporting real-time monitoring; (2) different controllers for controlling workflows definitions, the specification of the graphical user interface and the data that is managed by the user interfaces. The prototypical software system was implemented as a client-server application in Java using a real-time CORBA middleware component. The server component manages the registration of the user interface clients and controls the data exchange with the workflow management system. The definition of the user interface view, the process data and the managed data is stored in XML files and transferred as XML streams between the software components. The prototypical implementation shows that the separation of process models, data models and view models can lead to flexible monitoring and managing of workflows in real-time and thus guarantee valuable information of business processes at runtime