Model-Driven Engineering of Workflow User Interfaces

A model-driven engineering method is presented that provides designers with methodological guidance on how to systematically derive user interfaces of workflow information systems from a series of models. For this purpose, a workflow is recursively decomposed into processes that are in turn decomposed into tasks. Each task gives rise to a task model whose structure, ordering, and connection with the domain model allows a semi-automated generation of corresponding user interfaces by model-to-model transformation. Reshuffling tasks within a same process or reordering processes within a same workflow is straightforwardly propagated as a natural consequence of the mapping model used in the model-driven engineering. The various models involved in the method can be edited in a graphical editor based on Petri nets and simulated interactively. This editor also contains a set of workflow user interface patterns that are ready to use. The output file generated by the editor can then be exploited by a workflow execution engine to produce a running workflow system.