Rule-based ad-hoc workflow modeling for service coordination: A case study of a telecom operational support system

Workflow technology has spread over the wide areas which require process control (e.g. logistics and e-business) or resource coordination (e.g. cooperative work and grid computing). Among various types of workflow, we introduce a case of ad-hoc workflow process in a Korean telecom company. Since such a service process is generally accompanied with customer's participation, the procedure and state are flexibly changed and sometimes capricious to cope with customer's request and operator's unexpected situation. In case of network service provisioning or problem shooting processes, customers often request the changes of their service types or visit appointments, which result in flexible and adaptive management of the process instances. In this paper, we present a novel approach to workflow modeling based on modified ECA rules (named P-ECA) for the purpose of ad-hoc workflow process modeling. The rulebased workflow modeling is comprehensible to engineers and can be implemented in programs at ease; therefore it is expected that it can be widely adopted for the ad-hoc and adaptive workflow modeling which requires dynamic changes of its states by internal or external events.