Communication Based Flexible Process Management for Collaborative Work

In recent years, engineering areas and business application areas are incorporating computer sup-port for process management for improving efficiency and cooperation. A process is a sequence of collaborative human activities for a certain goal. A process management system is effective for clarifying process structure, for managing current status of the process, and also for managing roles of participants and required resources. However, the problem is that the human activity is naturally hard to be predefined completely, and a framework for flexible process management is necessary. This thesis addresses a method for flexible process management based on asynchronous com-munication, which is communication in which the creation and the reference of a message is done in different time, and addresses the method for adapting dynamic design or modification of process specifications. A specification is a partial or entire description of a process, or that of a common part of several processes, and is a major factor for the effectiveness of process management. First, the message transaction model, which is a model for representing processes and vari-ous advanced transactions based on asynchronous communication, is proposed. By the model, a process which is created and executed in an ad-hoc manner can be easily captured by the system