ITR: Flexible and Dynamic Workflow Design: Theory and Practice

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

The project proposes to develop a meta-object model and integrate it into the design of workflow systems. The meta-object model combines the affinity (desire-to-know) and privilege/obligation (need-to-know) information into a unified information model which facilitates efficient information access and secure access control. The Adlets and Malleable objects in this meta model are active objects that capture inter-dependency among object accesses. This information model is to be used to develop a new methodology for flexible and dynamic workflow system design. Traditional workflow systems are either process- or product-based. Different from these existing systems, workflows in the proposed information-based system models all workflows as activities of information accesses. As a result, it allows for incomplete specification of the initial workflow and dynamic construction of the workflow, i.e., exception and special sub-workflows are generated as needed when information accesses are invoked. There are two significant technical impacts in the research: the active meta-object model supports both performance and security for information access in a single uniform model, and the incorporation of it presents a new approach for workflow design which is more flexible and dynamic.