Service-oriented workflow

The advantages of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have forced many enterprises to reconsider the way their business processes are undertaken. Among various Information Technologies, the Workflow Management System greatly improves the efficiency of business processes. The challenge for Workflow Systems relies on their ability to align ICT and the processes of production and business. They should support the strategic policy of the enterprise and quickly respond to on-demand business and opportunities. Unfortunately, they suffer from some lacks and limitations due to their monolithic architectures. Most Workflow Management Systems are dependent on technology platforms and partially conform to standards. We attempt throughout the present paper to propose the next generation of Workflow architectures. We conceive workflow systems as a set of services, which are generic and platform-independent. Services are self-contained and fully-customized. Workflow services are assembled from computational components (i.e. web services), which are loosely coupled. The new architecture is split into layers to guarantee a high level of abstraction, each of which is managed by a crucial Web Service known as the orchestrator service.