YAWL - User Manual - Polytechnic of Namibia - Mirrors

10 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION• Through the BPMN2YAWL component, BPMN models can be mapped to the YAWL environment forexecution.• The Declare component (released through declare.sf.net) provides unique support for specifyingworkflows in terms of constraints. This approach can be combined with the Worklet approach thusproviding very powerful flexibility support.• YAWL’s architecture is Service-oriented and hence one can replace existing components with one’sown or extend the environment with newly developed components.• The YAWL environments supports the automated generation of forms. This is particularly useful forrapid prototyping purposes.• Tasks in YAWL can be mapped to human participants, Web Services, external applications or to Javaclasses.• Through the C-YAWL approach a theory has been developed for the configuration of YAWL models.For more information on process configuration visit www.processconfiguration.com.• Simulation support is offered through a link with the ProM (www.processmining.org) environment.Through this environment it is also possible to conduct post-execution analysis of YAWL processes(e.g. in order to identify bottlenecks).1.2 Obtaining the Latest Version of YAWLAs new versions of the YAWL Environment are released to the public, they will be available for downloadat the YAWL Sourceforge website (sourceforge.net/projects/yawl). From this site it is also possibleto access the source code of all components for development purposes.1.3 The YAWL FoundationFor up-to-the-minute information on any aspect of the YAWL Initiative, visit the YAWL Foundation Homepage(yawlfoundation.org). The YAWL Foundation is a non-profit organisation that acts as custodianof all intellectual property (IP) related to YAWL and its support environment.1.4 DocumentationApart from this user manual, there is a technical manual on YAWL and a number of case studies. Thesestudies provide detailed examples that you may wish to consult in order to obtain a deeper understandingof the application of YAWL.This manual does not really cover the control-flow concepts of YAWL in detail. One reason for this is thatthere are quite a few papers out there that do provide this information. We refer the reader to e.g. [10]for a justification of the extensions of Petri nets introduced for YAWL on the basis of the original controlflowpatterns. The main paper on YAWL, from a language point of view, is [11]. In this paper you finda formalisation of the control-flow concepts of YAWL. More recently, a CPN formalisation of newYAWL(control-flow, data and resource perspectives) was presented in [28]. For a formalisation of the OR-join,a complex synchronisation concept in YAWL, we refer to [34]. This definition supersedes the definitionprovided in [11].As mentioned above, YAWL extends Petri nets. There are a number of general introductions to Petri nets inthe literature. We refer the interested reader to [22, 20].