SPECIFYING ENTERPRISE PROCESSES WITH WORKFLOW MODELING LANGUAGES

In order to build a competitive enterprise which can survive in a glob al market, an enterprise has to be engineered accordingly. El makes us e of proven techniques such as enterprise engineering methodologies; e nterprise reference architectures, and generic building blocks to achi eve its goals. However, having the most comprehensive model is of no u se if the concepts modeled cannot be transferred into the real enterpr ise to adjust its behavior according to the model. As many authors hav e observed, the behavior of an enterprise can be best described throug h enterprise processes or business processes. If those could be enacte d automatically to drive the daily business operations, a huge step fo rward would be achieved in the area of model enactment Workflow-Manage ment-Systems (WFMSs) are one class of information systems which enable the automatic enactment of enterprise or business processes on a glob al and large-scale level. A WFMS provides computationally complete pro cess specification languages as well as execution facilities to drive business operations according to specified business processes. This pa per introduces a workflow modeling language of a WFMS to illustrate ho w enterprise processes can be specified with a formal language designe d for automatic execution of processes by WFMSs.