Workflow Services
Traditional workflow management systems on enterprise level are mainly concerned with the realization of business processes on document level which utilize standard tools, like office environments. A work-flow consists here mainly in transporting a set of documents between different units and persons with different obligations and roles in the process. Such processes are traditionally order- and sales processes, or administrative tasks.
To understand the notion of wearable workflows as they are featured in the OWCF it is necessary to look at a typical wearable application: a wearable applications is run on small or dedicated computers which are more or less integrated in the clothing of the worker and attached to a variety of sensors and specialized I/O equipment (head-mounted displays, gesture recognizers). These facts indicate the intricate structure of a wearable application: It must be highly context-aware, responsive and yet compact to a degree that it does not overstress the limited resources. In fact the most efficient wearable applications today are monolithic and fine-tuned applications.
The idea of wearable workflows and to support them by some kind of framework or component stems from the observation that workers are following usually a clearly defined work-plan which denotes which steps are to be taken (and documented) in order to get the task done. Since some basic steps are recurring in different situations and tasks – like pulling tight a screw or working on a check-list, writing code for these items only once, and re-use them as often as possible is a natural idea. Such steps or reuse-able code-segments in such scenarios are called wearlets and the complete work-task can be modelled as sequence of wearlets exchanging data-objects with a defined start- and end-point of the execution forming a wearable workflow.
The basic structure of a wearlet is shown in the following figure.
This structure shows the interfaces a wearlet has to its environment. This is usually the workflow or the workflow-engine but a wearlet can be used without any workflow environment at all – just like using an arbitrary JAVA object with specific methods. A wearlet represents a specific task. Therefore it needs to have access to data-objects which serve as input or output containers. In fact all depicted elements become meaningful if a wearlet is used in an integrated environment, like a workflow where data between wearlets has to be managed and the execution of wearlet is controlled by some kind of logic through a control component. However, the concept of a wearlet is agnostic to its environment by design. All dependencies which are introduced aside from using the interfaces are under the responsibility of the wearlet itself. Only with this design principle wearlets can be realized flexible enough to cope with different environments and tasks.
From the technical side a wearable workflow is nothing more than a container with a defined interface for the data-objects inside it. Conceptually a workflow consists of wearlets, data-objects and a potential control-structure – the control flow, which defines the potential sequences of execution of wearlets. So in the course of this document it will be shown how to setup-up a workflow and how to execute a workflow. A workflow is the technological representation of a – more or less – complex task to be performed by one or more persons. Thus the successful execution of a workflow means to solve the given task by following a sensible sequence or work-steps.
System requirements
The Workflow Service has the following requirements:
- Java 1.4.2
Maturity Level (?)
| Component Name | Responsible Partner | Initial Maturity Level | Current Maturity Level |
| Workflow Services | Siemens C-Lab | 0 | 7/8 |
