87 PatternFlow: Supporting Standardized Description and Enactment of Business Processes Marcos Kalinowski COPPE – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro PO Box 68511 - 21 941-972 Rio de Janeiro - Brasil mkali@cos.ufrj.br Marcos R. S. Borges NCE – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro PO Box 2324 - 20 001-970 Rio de Janeiro - Brasil mborges@nce.ufrj.br Guilherme H. Travassos COPPE – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro PO Box 68511 - 21 941-972 Rio de Janeiro - Brasil ght@cos.ufrj.br RESUMO O estabelecimento de padrões para tratar requisitos de workflow de forma sistemática é importante, uma vez que processos, após sua modelagem, deveriam poder ser descritos e executados por sistemas de gerenciamento de workflow. Apesar do surgimento de tais padrões, muitos deles não são apoiados por grande parte das linguagens de modelagem de workflow e dos sistemas de gerenciamento de workflow. Além disto, muitos de tais padrões apresentam soluções para problemas freqüentes durante a atividade de análise de projetos de workflow, o que realça a importância de apoiá-los. Neste artigo apresentamos PatternFlow, uma infra-estrutura para descrever e executar processos de negócio cujo conjunto de requisitos foi derivado principalmente de conhecimento adquirido da análise de padrões de workflow. PatternFlow têm sido utilizada, entre outros, para implementar ISPIS, uma infra- estrutura para apoio ao processo de inspeção de software. Avaliações de ISPIS na academia e na indústria nos permitiram obter uma percepção adicional sobre a viabilidade de utilizar PatternFlow para executar processos em ambientes industriais. ABSTRACT The establishment of patterns to systematically address workflow requirements is important, since it should be possible for a modeled process to be described and enacted by workflow management systems. Despite the sprouting of those workflow patterns, many of them are not supported in a great amount of workflow modeling languages and workflow management systems. Moreover, many of those patterns recur quite frequently during the analysis phase of workflow projects, which highlights the importance of supporting such patterns. In this paper we present PatternFlow, a framework for describing and enacting business processes whose requirements set was derived mainly from knowledge acquired from the analysis of documented workflow patterns. PatternFlow has been used, among others, to implement ISPIS, a framework for supporting the software inspection process. Evaluations of ISPIS in academy and industry allowed us to gain additional insight regarding the feasibility of using PatternFlow for enacting processes used in real industrial environments. PALAVRAS-CHAVE Sistemas de Gerenciamento de Workflow, Padrões de Workflow, Descrição de Processos, Execução de Processos. KEYWORDS Workflow Management Systems, Workflow Patterns, Process Description, Process Enactment. 1. INTRODUCTION The available workflow management systems present a large variety of languages, as well as concepts based on different paradigms [1]. Thus, understanding their main requirements and how well those requirements are supported by existing workflow management systems becomes a difficult task. One step towards facilitating this task was the initiative of establishing workflow patterns [1, 2, 3, and 4] to systematically address workflow management system requirements. Since the sprouting of the workflow patterns [4], several workflow management systems have been evaluated considering them as reference. The evaluation of 15 commercial workflow management systems, for instance, is described in [1]. In this evaluation the authors noticed that each of the workflow patterns was supported in at least one of the systems. However, none of the systems offered support to all of the patterns. Moreover, most of them support only a relatively small subset of the more advanced patterns. Since many of those patterns recur quite frequently during the analysis phase of workflow projects [1], some business processes, depending on their complexity, can not be described nor enacted by any of those workflow management systems. Based on this scenario, we present PatternFlow, a framework for describing and enacting business processes, whose requirements were derived mainly from the analysis of the documented workflow patterns. The initial concept of PatternFlow is described in [5]. Over the years PatternFlow evolved and has been used, among others, to implement ISPIS [6], a framework for supporting the software inspection process. Having a real industry process described in PatternFlow allowed us to perform evaluations, in academy and industry [7]. The feedback of those evaluations helped to gain additional insight into the suitability of PatternFlow for enacting processes. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the workflow patterns. Section 3 describes PatternFlow and how the workflow patterns were supported in it. Section 4 presents the case study of using PatternFlow for implementing ISPIS, as well as the evaluations 20 a 22 de Novembro de 2006 Natal, RN, Brasil © Sociedade Brasileira de Computação Comissão Especial de Sistemas Colaborativos Anais do III Simpósio Brasileiro de Sistemas Colaborativos, pp. 87-97.