Changes in recent business environments have created the necessity for a more efficient and effective business process management. The workflow management system is software that assists in defining business processes as well as automatically controlling the execution of the processes. We propose a new approach to the automatic execution of business processes using event-condition-action (ECA) rules that can be automatically triggered by an active database. First of all, we propose the concept of blocks that can classify process flows into several patterns. A block is a minimal unit that can specify the behaviors represented in a process model. An algorithm is developed to detect blocks from a process definition network and transform it into a hierarchical tree model. The behaviors in each block type are modeled using ACTA formalism. This provides a theoretical basis from which ECA rules are identified. The proposed ECA rule-based approach shows that it is possible to execute the workflow using the active capability of database without users' intervention. The operation of the proposed methods is illustrated through an example process.

An Asynchronous Differential Join (ADJ) scheme that can maintain join-materialized views in a distributed environment is introduced. The efficiency of the asynchronous data replication can be enhanced by minimizing data to be sent to relevant sites. It also has an advantage in that the scheme prevents huge base tables from being locked by the remote requests through the utilization of differential files. Experimental results show that the faster the communication speed and the lesser the screening factor, the higher the total cost ratio.Request access from your librarian to read this article's full text.