Verification of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows

Today's workflow management systems have not sufficiently dealt with time information, which involves time modeling at build-time and time management at run-time. As a consequence, workflow management systems are short of the ability to support the checking of temporal constraints at run-time. Although several approaches have been devised to tackle this problem, they are limited to a single workflow, using static techniques to verify temporal constraints on it. However, in an environment with concurrent workflows, there may well exist resource constraints between these workflows, which affect significantly the verification of temporal constraints at run-time. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamic verification of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows. We investigate resource constraints in workflow management systems and concurrent workflow executions, and then develop the proposed verification method through analysing the temporal relationship and resource constraints between activities from different workflows. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.