Temporalities for Workflow Management Systems

Abstract

Time is a very important dimension of any aspect in human life, affecting also information and information management. As such, time must be dealt with in a suitable way, considering all its facets. The related literature already considered temporal information management from a pure database point of view: temporal aspects (also known as temporalities) of stored information cannot be neglected and the adoption of a suitable database management system (Temporal Database Management System TDBMS) could be helpful. Recently, research of the temporal data management area started to consider business processes, extending and enriching models, techniques, and architectures to suitably manage temporal aspects. According to this scenario, the authors discuss here some of the main advantages achievable in managing temporal aspects and consider temporalities in process models, in exception definition, in the architecture of a Workflow Management System (WfMS), and in the scheduling of tasks and their assignment to agents.