Dynamic verification of temporal constraints in production workflows

Primitive support for time management has been recognised as one of the most significant limitations of today's workflows. In this paper, we propose a new temporal model for production workflows. After introducing basic features of the temporal model, we describe two time visualisation concepts: the duration space and the instantiation space that are used respectively for representation of relative and absolute (real) time. Then, we illustrate how these concepts may be applied to modeling of absolute and relative deadline constraints and dynamic verification of their temporal consistency. The work presented sets foundations for more advanced workflow management that includes features such as monitoring of workflow execution, reasoning about deadlines as well as management of workloads and learning about deadlines.