The last decade observed an increasing number of products entering the Business Process Management (BPM) market, all claiming to address every conceivable workflow issue an organisation may face.  Yet organisations still encounter problems sourcing a BPM solution capable of capturing processes that require advanced concurrency concepts.

YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) is an original and sophisticated workflow language developed at QUT's BPM research group in collaboration with Eindhoven University of Technology.  YAWL builds on the insights gained from the workflow patterns research and combines it with the powerful language of Petri-nets.  The result - the ultimate mix of theory and practice.

YAWL provides a very powerful, yet fundamentally simple language for process modellers to describe complex control flow relations between business processes.  Consequently, YAWL enables businesses to own and manage very flexible and dynamic business processes.

YAWL has many strengths that can be listed.  YAWL is expressive - it is the first language to provide comprehensive support for all of the workflow patterns.  YAWL is visual - it is composed of visual elements.  Business processes are represented graphically making them more intuitive to the viewer.  YAWL is concise - it is solution oriented, not technology oriented, hence its constructs are designed to align with the needs of the problem solver.  YAWL is flexible - YAWL models are expected to enable web service invocation in the near future.  Workflow can then occur across organisational boundaries without relying on a particular middleware or the need for complex rescripting.  YAWL is reliable - YAWL has a formal foundation, based upon Petri-nets.  This foundation almost guarantees that workflow specifications do not become ambiguous or unnecessarily complex - a characteristic generally not found in a workflow system.

Main Features of YAWL

Latest

• Comprehensive support for the workflow patterns.
• Extends Petri nets, a powerful theory for concurrency.
• The YAWL (control-flow) language is formally defined, both syntax and semantics.
• Sophisticated support for workflow analysis at build time.
• Supports persistence, automated form generation, workflow administration.
• Approach based on worklets and Ripple Down Rules (RDR) provides unique solution to dynamic workflow.
• Service-oriented architecture facilitating the development of sophisticated extensions.
• Support for temporal aspects.
• Support for data perspective based on XML technologies (XML Schema, XPath, XQuery).
• Support for resource perspective.
• Currently used in production workflow

• SAP has released an interesting article on YAWL
• YAWL Beta 8 has been released, with an enhanced Worklet Service that provides support for dynamic exception handling.
• New version of YAWL editor released (1.4 to go with engine version 7.1) with additional semantic analysis support and engine file import facilities along with a number of usability improvements.
• YAWL Beta 7 released! This release provides support for dynamic workflow.
• Computerworld published an article about YAWL
• New release of YAWL integrates with SMS messaging.
• New release of YAWL editor with semantic analysis support.
• YAWL Beta 6 released! Highlights include support for the resource perspective and more robust persistance support. Integration with PostgreSQL as an alternative to Hypersonic.

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