Wil van der Aalst Books

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to workflow management, the management of business processes with information technology. By defining, analyzing, and redesigning an organization's resources and operations, workflow management systems ensure that the right information reaches the right person or computer application at the right time. The book provides a basic overview of workflow terminology and organization, as well as detailed coverage of workflow modeling with Petri nets. Because Petri nets make definitions easier to understand for nonexperts, they facilitate communication between designers and users. The book includes a chapter of case studies, review exercises, and a glossary. A special Web site developed by the authors, www.workflowcourse.com, features animation, interactive examples, lecture materials, exercises and solutions, relevant links, and other valuable resources for the classroom.

The study of business processes has become a vital method for coordinating complex service- and knowledge-based activities within organizations. Business process management (BPM) focuses on the methods and tools for designing, enacting, and analyzing these processes. This volume serves as a definitive guide to using patterns that synthesize various approaches to modeling business processes. It introduces the well-known workflow patterns collection, which consists of recurrent, generic constructs that describe common scenarios in business process modeling and execution through problem-solution dialectics. The principles behind the patterns approach ensure independence from specific technologies, representational formalisms, or modeling methods, making them widely applicable across BPM domains. The authors, informed by extensive research from the Workflow Patterns Initiative, provide a thorough introduction to business process modeling and management fundamentals, detail three major pattern catalogs from control-flow, data, and resource perspectives, and survey related BPM patterns. This book, a companion to the authoritative Workflow Patterns website, is an essential resource for academics and practitioners in business process modeling and management.