Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Operations research or analysis
Reexamination Certificate
1999-11-19
2004-12-14
Hafiz, Tariq R. (Department: 3623)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Operations research or analysis
Reexamination Certificate
active
06832201
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to improvement of request shipping in distributed applications, particularly in workflow management systems, further referred to as WFMSs that are operating in a distributed environment in a networked computer system. In particular, the present invention relates to method and system for optimizing request shipping in such systems.
2. Prior Art
Although the subject matter of the invention is applicable to a broad variety of applications, i.e. whenever an application is able to be described with the basic structure and terminology of WFMSs, the present invention will be disclosed herein applied to WFMSs by way of example.
A new area of technology with increasing importance is the domain of WFMSs. WFMSs as for example implemented by IBM FlowMark support the modeling and execution of business processes. Business processes control which piece of work of a network of pieces of work will be performed by whom and which resources are exploited for this work, i.e. a business process describes how an enterprise will achieve its business goals. The individual pieces of work might be distributed across a multitude of different computer systems connected by some type of network.
The process of designing, developing and manufacturing a new product and the process of changing or adapting an existing product presents many challenges to product managers and engineers to bring the product to market for the least cost and within schedule while maintaining or even increasing product quality. Many companies are realizing that the conventional product design process is not satisfactory to meet these needs. They require early involvement of manufacturing engineering, cost engineering, logistic planning, procurement, manufacturing, service and support with the design effort. Furthermore, they require planning and control of product data through design, release, and manufacturing.
The correct and efficient execution of business processes within a company, e.g. development or production processes, is of enormous importance for a company and has significant influence on company's overall success in the market place. Therefore, those processes have to be regarded similar as technology processes and have to be tested, optimized and monitored. The management of such processes is usually performed and supported by a computer based process or WFMS.
In D. J. Spoon: “Project Management Environment”, IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 32, No. 9A, February 1990, pages 250 to 254, a process management environment is described including an operating environment, data elements, and application functions and processes.
In R. T. Marshak: “IBM's FlowMark, Object-Oriented Workflow for Mission-Critical Applications”, Workgroup Computing Report (USA), Vol. 17, No. 5, 1994, page 3 to 13, the object character of IBM FlowMark as a client/server product built on a true object model that is targeted for mission-critical production process application development and deployment is described. In H. A. Inniss and J. H. Sheridan: “Workflow Management Based on an Object-Oriented Paradigm”, IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 37, No. 3, March 1994, page 185, other aspects of object-oriented modeling on customization and changes are described.
In F. Leymann and D. Roller: “Business Process Management with FlowMark”, Digest of papers, Cat. No. 94CH3414-0, Spring COMPCON 94, 1994, pages 230 to 234, the state-of-the-art computer process management tool IBM FlowMark is described. The meta model of IBM FlowMark is presented as well as the implementation of IBM FlowMark. The possibilities of IBM FlowMark for modeling of business processes as well as their execution are discussed. The product IBM FlowMark is available for different computer platforms and documentation for IBM FlowMark is available in every IBM branch.
In F. Leymann: “A meta model to support the modeling and execution of processes”, Proceedings of the 11th European Meeting on Cybernetics and System Research EMCR92, Vienna, Austria, Apr. 21 to 24, 1992, World Scientific 1992, pages 287 to 294, a meta model for controlling business processes is presented and discussed in detail.
The “IBM FlowMark for OS/2”, document number GH 19-8215-01, IBM Corporation, 1994, available in every IBM sales office, represents a typical modern, sophisticated, and powerful WFMS. It supports the modeling of business processes as a network of activities; refer for instance to “Modeling Workflow”, document number SH 19-8241, IBM Corporation, 1996. As further information on Workflow Management Systems available in IBM sales offices one could mention: IBM MQSeries Concepts and Architecture, document number GH 12-6285; IBM MQSeries Getting Started with Buildtime, document number SH 12-6286; IBM MQSeries Getting Started with Runtime, document number SH 12-6287. This network of activities, the process model, is constructed as a directed, acyclic, weighted, colored graph. The nodes of the graph represent the activities or workitems which are performed. The edges of the graph, the control connectors, describe the potential sequence of execution of the activities. Definition of the process graph is via the IBM FlowMark Definition Language (FDL) or the built-in graphical editor. The runtime component of the workflow manager interprets the process graph and distributes the execution of activities to the right person at the right place, e.g. by assigning tasks to a work list according to the respective person, wherein said work list is stored as digital data within said workflow or process management computer system.
In F. Leymann and W. Altenhuber: “Managing business processes as an information resource”, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 32(2), 1994, the mathematical theory underlying the IBM FlowMark product is described.
In D. Roller: “Verifikation von Workflows in IBM FlowMark”, in J. Beckerund G. Vossen (Hrsg.): “Geschaeftsprozessmodellierung und Workflows”, International Thompson Publishing, 1995, the requirement and possibility of the verification of workflows is described. Furthermore the feature of graphical animation for verification of the process logic is presented as it is implemented within the IBM FlowMark product.
For implementing a computer based process management system, firstly the business processes have to be analyzed and, as the result of this analysis, a process model has to be constructed as a network of activities corresponding to the business process. In the IBM FlowMark product, the process models are not transformed into an executable. At run time, an instance of the process is created from the process model, called a process instance. This process instance is then interpreted dynamically by the IBM FlowMark product.
A user typically interacts with the WFMS via a graphical end user interface that represents the tasks to be performed by the user as icons. Work for a particular task is started by the user by double-clicking on the appropriate icon which in turn starts the program implementing the activity.
Said activities are generally steps within a particular business process. Each activity represents a piece of work which the assigned person can complete by starting a program or another process.
The activities to be performed have typically a fine structure:
An Activation Condition defines when the activity is ready for scheduling by the workflow manager; an Exit Condition defines when an activity should be treated as complete by the workflow manager. The core of the activity is the Task which is comprised of the proper activity and a query on an organization database. The Proper Activity associates the activity with a program object. The program object defines for each operating system, and possibly for each user, the name and operational characteristics for an executable piece of software. The executable piece of software is started when the activity is performed by a user. The query on the organization database defines the persons responsible for performing the activity. When the activity i
Leymann Frank
Roller Dieter
Boyce Andre
Hafiz Tariq R.
Perez-Pineiro, Esq. Rafael
Scully Scott Murphy & Presser
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