Making Workflows Context-aware: A Way to Support Knowledge-intensive Tasks

Heravizadeh, M. and Edmond, D.

In business processes, knowledge-intensive tasks are ones in which the people performing such tasks are involved in a fair degree of uncertainty. These people are required to apply and bring together their experience, training, expertise and judgement. In particular, they are concerned about issues or problems that might arise and how these are best dealt with or avoided. Current workflow technology does not support such tasks, as it deals only with predictable and easily automated decision making. In particular, it fails to deliver the right information to the user at the right time based on the context of the process instance, thus not taking the opportunity to forewarn users of potential problems. Context-aware workflows are a way to overcome shortcomings of workflow management systems. This paper proposes an approach for the dynamic integration of knowledge and workflow processes by offering proper support for the realtime handling of the both the current context of a process and its execution path.

Cite as: Heravizadeh, M. and Edmond, D. (2008). Making Workflows Context-aware: A Way to Support Knowledge-intensive Tasks. In Proc. Fifth Asia-Pacific Conference on Conceptual Modelling (APCCM 2008), Wollongong, NSW, Australia. CRPIT, 79. Hinze, A. and Kirchberg, M., Eds. ACS. 79-88.

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