Modern Business Process Automation: YAWL and its Support Environment

The ?eld of Business Process Management (BPM) is marred by a seemingly e- less sequence of (proposed) industry standards. Contrary to other ?elds (e.g., civil or electronic engineering), these standards are not the result of a widely supported consolidationofwell-understoodandwell-establishedconceptsandpractices.Inthe BPM domain, it is frequently the case that BPM vendors opportunistically become involved in the creation of proposed standards to exert or maintain their in?uence and interests in the ?eld. Despite the initial fervor associated with such standardi- tion activities, it is no less frequent that vendors either choose to drop their support for standards that they earlier championed on an opportunistic basis or elect only to partially support them in their commercial offerings. Moreover, the results of the standardization processes themselves are a concern. BPM standards tend to deal with complex concepts, yet they are never properly de?ned and all-too-often not informed by established research. The result is a plethoraof languagesand tools, with no consensuson conceptsand their implem- tation. They also fail to provide clear direction in the way in which BPM standards should evolve. One can also observe a dichotomy between the “business” side of BPM and its “technical” side. While it is clear that the application of BPM will fail if not placed in a proper business context, it is equally clear that its application will go nowhere if it remains merely a motivational exercise with schemas of business processes hanging on the wall gathering dust.

Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede, PhD, is a Professor at Queensland University of Technology. He is an original contributor to the well-known workflow patterns as well as a codesigner of the YAWL language and manager of the development of its open-source support environment.

Wil M.P. van der Aalst, PhD, is a Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and an Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology. He is coauthor of the textbook Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems and editor of several other books in the areas of Business Process Management and Petri nets.

Michael Adams, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology. He has developed the concepts of Worklets and Exlets to deal with workflow evolution and unexpected exceptions in YAWL. In addition, he is currently the technical lead of the YAWL support environment.

Nick Russell, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology. He has conducted extensive research in the area of workflow patterns leading to collections of control-flow, data, resource and exception handling patterns. This work formed the basis for newYAWL and the solutions to resource and exception handling in YAWL 2.0.