ULTRAflow - A Lightweight Workflow Management System
- System description -

Alfred Fent and Burkhard Freitag

In Proc. of the International Workshop on Functional and (Constraint) Logic Programming (WFLP 2001) , Report No. 2017, University of Kiel


Abstract

Workflow management systems usually use a graphical notation to define workflows, often based on Petri nets or specialized workflow graphs. Yet, most commercial systems have to struggle with some fundamental problems, like unclear semantics of the graphical constructs, complicated specifications, and the unability to handle subworkflows. In this paper, we describe how the building blocks of workflows can be expressed in the rule based update language ULTRA. It turns out that these building blocks have counterparts in the rule language that are easy and natural to specify. The ideas presented here are implemented in the prototype system ULTRAflow.