A typical workflow is specified by a set of predefined tasks executed in a
sequence flow in which business objects represented as documents are handled
to reach a business goal.Workflow actors with precise roles handle documents
reflecting the results of executed tasks. However, increasing agile
nature of business processes implies neither the potential tasks nor their sequence
flow can be defined a priori. In this context, a document-based workflow
(DocWF) in which the handled documents may preserve the statefulness
of a business process helping an actor to define potential tasks and their sequence
flow at runtime.
In this paper, we present a formal model of a DocWF to address agile
business processes. We first classify the associated entities and their relationships
in a meta-model. To this end, a formal execution model of a DocWF
system is provided. We illustrate a dynamic execution with an electronic
health record (EHR) generation workflow that handles an XML document of
EHR.
