FlowiXML

What is FlowiXML?
In today’s corporate environment, Information Systems (IS) are a necessary and integral part of any modern organizations. Information Technology (IT) professionals gather functional requirements from the organization, perform system and software design, and create end user applications ready to use. The lack of communication channels to coordinate the correct transfer of knowledge among the stakeholders of the software development process stresses the need for a methodological framework that considers both: the business and the IT views.

The introduction of Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) in organizations has emerged as a major advantage to plan, control and organize business process. The WfMS in a modern organization should be highly adaptable to the frequent organizational changes. The adaptability of the WfMS includes changes on the User Interfaces (UIs) that are used to control the business process.

FlowiXML is a methodology for developing the various UI of a Workflow Information System (WIS), which are advocated to automate processes, following a model-centric approach based on the requirements and processes of the organization. The methodology applies to: 1) integrate human and machines based activities, in particular those involving interaction with IT applications and tools, 2) to identify how tasks are structured, who perform them, what their relative order is, how they are offered or assigned, and how tasks are being tracked.

The methodology steps are:
1. Identification of tasks. Dividing organizational work into tasks is made through the use of some criteria, for each task we define an ID, a name, the nature, a brief description and rational.
2. Task modeling. For each identified task, we provide an individual task model and the completeness and consistency rules for task modeling are checked.
3. Organization modeling. Organizational units’ specification consists in specifying the location in which the work must be done.
4. Job and user modeling. It is necessary to identify all users involved in the performance of tasks. Jobs are ways to structure the crew of people inside the organization. It involves the complete collection of knowledge and practices needed by a definite human resource to perform a task.
5. Process modeling. Process definition gives the paths that may be followed by a particular task. In this step we organize tasks into processes according to definitions of jobs and user by relying on identification criteria for processes. This part is based on Petri nets notation.
6. Workflow modeling. Now, we model the workflow resulting from the organization of processes according to identification criteria and assembling rules. One characteristic of workflow is to determine the right person for the right task at the right moment; for that purpose we rely on workflow resource patterns.
7. UI definition. This step is achieved by relying on the UsiXML method that progressively moves from a task model to a final user interface. This approach consists of three steps: deriving one or many abstract user interfaces from a task model, deriving one or many concrete user interfaces from each abstract one, and producing the code of the corresponding final user interfaces.
8. Workflow simulation and implementation. After we develop all the UIs for each task, we have control of how the work is flowing inside the organization, for this purpose we have a workflow manager editor. Following the Petri net representation, resource choice is made when a token is in place preceding a transition. It is managed following resource patterns defined with the editor. When a task performance is started the associated token goes from place to the associated transition. In this way, work in progress is represented in the workflow simulation diagram. Each user that was designed in the workflow should have an agenda to view and manage the tasks that are assigned or offered to them. Each agenda can be visualized as a queue of tasks assigned to a resource.

More details
The methodology is illustrated through a set of case studies.

• Bank credit for a car
• Organization of a Triathlon
• How to get my driving license
• Transport de containers par bateaux, trains et camions
• Installation de matériel informatique
• Order personalized compression stockings over Internet
• Organisation des 24h vélos de Louvain-La-Neuve
• Airport passenger workflow
• Fabrication de produits adhésifs

Tool Support
The tool support, developed by Christophe Lemaigre, is composed of two components which are complementary .
The first tool, the workflow editor, supports the design of workflow information system following our methodology. It provides to designers a graphical editor to specify: the workflow using Petri net nation, resources allocation patterns, jobs and workers definition, task details.
Workflow Editor
The second tool, the workflow manager, allows the analysis of the workflow in run-time. Managers are benefited as they can see the overview of the organization, their process, identify process that are producing bottlenecks or just anticipating them, using the traffic light-based colors assigned to each process. A red process means a bottleneck, yellow means caution on this process, there is still time to do something about it; no color refers to clear process. In addition, the current version of the workflow manager simulates the agendas corresponding to the different workers in the organization illustrating the allocation of work process.
Workflow Manager

Screenshots/videos

Task model editor and Job handler editor Workers editor, Resource patterns editor Manager agenda and Cases list

The next video demonstrating how to use the workflow editor and the simulator for workflow user interfaces.



Download
The workflow Editor is available for downloading. Please refer to the user manual in case you need help while using the tool.

Note
The conceptual modelling of workflow has been integrated in the current version of UsiXML.

Author
FlowiXML is developed by Josefina Guerrero Garcia in her Ph.D. research in the Unit of Information Systems, Louvain School of Management, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.

Publications

Journals

• Guerrero, J., Lemaigre, Ch., Gonzalez Calleros, J.M., Vanderdonckt, J., Towards a Model-Based User Interface Development for Workflow Information Systems, International Journal of Universal Computer Science, Vol. 14, No. 19, 2008, pp. 3236-3249.
  
• Guerrero, J., Vanderdonckt, J., Gonzalez Calleros, J.M., FlowiXML: a Step towards Designing Workflow Management Systems, Journal of Web Engineering, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2008, pp. 163-182.
  

Book Chapters

• Guerrero Garcia, J., Vanderdonckt, J., González Calleros, J.M., Developing user interfaces for community-oriented workflow information systems, Chapter 16, in D. Akoumianakis (ed.), “Virtual Communities of Practice and Social Interactive Technologies: Lifecycle and Workflow Analysis”, IGI Global Inc., Hershey, 2009, pp. 307-329.
  
• González Calleros, J.M., Guerrero Garcia, J., Muñoz Arteaga, J., Vanderdonckt, J., Martínez-Ruiz, J., A Method for Generating Multiplatform User Interfaces for E-Learning Environments, in T.-T. Goh (ed.), “Multiplatform E-Learning Systems and Technologies: Mobile Devices for Ubiquitous ICT-Based Education », IGI Global Inc., Hershey, 2009, pp. 90-111.
  
• Guerrero, J., Vanderdonckt, J., Lemaigre, Ch.,Identification Criteria in Task Modeling, Proc. of 1st IFIP TC 13 Human-Computer Interaction Symposium HCIS’2008 (Milan, 8-9 September 2008), P. Forbrig, F. Paterno, A.M. Pejtersen (eds.), International Federation of Information Processing, Vol. 272, Springer, Boston, 2008, pp. 7-20. DOI Bookmark
  
• Lemaigre, Ch.,Guerrero, J., Vanderdonckt, J., Interface Model Elicitation from Textual Scenarios, Proc. of 1st IFIP TC 13 Human-Computer Interaction Symposium HCIS’2008 (Milan, 8-9 September 2008), P. Forbrig, F. Paterno, A.M. Pejtersen (eds.), International Federation of Information Processing, Vol. 272, Springer, Boston, 2008, pp. 53-66. DOI Bookmark
  
• Guerrero, J., Vanderdonckt, J., González Calleros, J.M.,Winckler, M.,Towards a Library of Workflow User Interface Patterns, Proc. of 15th Int. Workshop on Design, Specification, and Verification of Interactive Systems DSV-IS’2008 (Kingston, July 16-18, 2008), Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences, Vol. 5136, Springer, Berlin, 2008, pp. 96-101.DOI Bookmark
  
• Martínez-Ruiz, J.,González Calleros, J.M., Guerrero Garcia, J.,Muñoz Arteaga, J.,Vanderdonckt, J.,ECOOL: Generation of Collaborative Multiplatform Scenarios with Interactive Learning Objects, Proc. of 9th Int. Conf. in Human Computer Interaction Interacción’2008 (Albacete, June 9-11 2008), M. Lozano and J.A. Gallaud (Eds.), Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Castilla - La Mancha, Albacete, 2008, pp. 361-370. ISBN 978-84-691-3871-7.
  
• Guerrero García, J., Lemaigre, Ch.,Vanderdonckt, J.,González Calleros, J.M.,Model-Driven Engineering of Workflow User Interfaces, Proc. of 7th Int. Conf. on Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces CADUI’2008 (Albacete, 11-13 June 2008), Springer, Berlin, 2008, to appear.
  

Conference Proceedings

• Guerrero, J., Vanderdonckt, J., Lemaigre, Ch.,González Calleros, J.M.,How to Describe Workflow Information Systems to Support Business Process, Proc. of 10th IEEE Joint Conference on E-Commerce Technology and Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce and E-Services CEC’2008 (Washington D.C., July 21, 2008), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, 2008, pp. 404-411.
  
• Guerrero, J., Vanderdonckt, J., Gonzalez, J.M., Winckler, M., Modeling User Interfaces to Workflow Information Systems, Proc. of 4th International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems ICAS’2008 (Gosier, 16-21 March 2008), IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, 2008, to appear.
  

Thesis

• Ch. Lemaigre, Développement d'un éditeur graphique de workflow générant automatiquement ses spécifications fonctionnelles, M.Sc. thesis, UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, 28 August 2007. .
  
• Guerrero Garcia, J., Conceptual Modeling of User Interfaces to Workflow Information Systems, DEA thesis, UCL, Louvain-la-Neuve, September 2006.. The presentation is also available

Posters

• Guerrero, J., Model-riven Engineering of Workflow User Interfaces, LSM Doctoral Consortium, Namur, January 12th 2009.
• Guerrero, J., A Method for Developing User Interfaces of Worklow Information Systems, LSM Doctoral Consortium, Mons, 13 December 2007.