Design and Control of Workflow Processes: Business Process Management for the Service Industry: 2617 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2617) - Tapa blanda

Reseña del editor

The motivation behind the conception of this monograph was to advance scientific knowledge about the design and control of workflow processes. A workflow pr- ess (or workflow for short) is a specific type of business process, a way of or- nizing work and resources. Workflows are commonly found within large admin- trative organizations such as banks, insurance companies, and governmental agencies. Carrying out the tasks of a workflow in a particular order is required to handle one type of case. Examples of cases are mortgage applications, customer complaints, and claims for unemployment benefits. A workflow used in handling mortgage applications may contain tasks for recording the application, specifying a mortgage proposal, and approving the final policy. The monograph concentrates on four workflow-related issues within the area of Business Process Management; the field of designing and controlling business processes. The first issue is how workflows can be adequately modeled. Workflow mod- ing is an indispensable activity to support any reasoning about workflows. Diff- ent purposes of workflow modeling can be distinguished, such as system ena- ment by Workflow Management Systems, knowledge management, costing, and budgeting. The focus of workflow modeling in this monograph is (a) to support simulation and analysis of workflows and (b) to specify a new workflow design. The main formalism used for the modeling of workflows is the Petri net. Many - isting notions to define several relevant properties have been adopted, such as the workflow net and the soundness notion.

Reseña del editor

This monograph is devoted to advancing the scientific knowledge about the design and control of workflow processes. The author focuses on the following four issues in the area of business process management:

- adequate workflow modeling

- workflow design and redesign

- performance evaluation of workflow processes

- optimal resource allocation in an operational workflow.

All in all, this book, providing several new results and insights in the field of business process modeling and analysis, is a beautiful mixture of rigorous scientific research and direct practical experiences.