Workflow technology has spread over the wide areas which require process control (e.g. logistics and e-business) or resource coordination (e.g. cooperative work and grid computing). Among various types of workflow, we introduce a case of ad-hoc workflow process in a Korean telecom company. Since such a service process is generally accompanied with customer's participation, the procedure and state are flexibly changed and sometimes capricious to cope with customer's request and operator's unexpected situation. In case of network service provisioning or problem shooting processes, customers often request the changes of their service types or visit appointments, which result in flexible and adaptive management of the process instances. In this paper, we present a novel approach to workflow modeling based on modified ECA rules (named P-ECA) for the purpose of ad-hoc workflow process modeling. The rule-based workflow modeling is comprehensible to engineers and can be implemented in programs at ease; therefore it is expected that it can be widely adopted for the ad-hoc and adaptive workflow modeling which requires dynamic changes of its states by internal or external events.

Flexibility, adaptation and distribution have been regarded as major challenges of modern interorganizational workflow. To address these issues, this paper proposes an interorganizational workflow execution framework based on process agents and ECA rules. In our framework, an interorganizational workflow is modeled as a multiagent system with a process agent for each organization. The whole execution is divided into two parts: the intra-execution, which means execution within a same organization, and the inter-execution, which represents interaction between organizations. For intra-execution, we use the method of transforming the graph-based local workflow into block-based workflow to design general ECA rules. ECA rules are used to control internal state transitions and process agents are used to control external state transitions of tasks in the local workflows. Inter-execution is realized by process agent interaction protocols. The proposed approach can provide flexible execution of interorganizational workflow with distributed organizational autonomy and adaptation. A case study of offshore software development is illustrated for the proposed approach.

Changes in recent business and scientific environment have created a necessity for more efficient and effective workflow infrastructure. With increasing emphasis on Service-oriented architecture, service composition becomes a hot topic in workflow research. This paper proposes a novel approach of using ECA rules to realize the workflow modeling and implementation for service composition. First of all, the concept and formalization of ECA rule-based workflow is presented. Special activities and data structures are customized for the purpose of service composition. Second, an automatic event composition and decomposition algorithm is developed to ensure the correctness and validness of service composition at design time. Finally, the proposed ECA rule-based approach for service composition is illustrated through the implementation of a workflow prototype system.