Abstract:
The Workflows Management Technology is a relatively new solution for a broad system integration. Workflows are generally accepted as a backbone technology especially within new applications such as e-commerce, distributed manufacturing and virtual enterprises. This talk will focus on some limitations of the current systems and potential extensions to provide flexibility for dynamic aspects of system's life cycle. Starting with a summary of the state-of-art in this domain, followed with illustration of encountered shortcomings of workflows management systems, we will focus on two specific problems; modification of the process definition after the system deployment and instance vs. class of instances execution strategies. The talk concludes with discussion of some open problems and provides a direction to a comprehensive literature in the area.

Biography:
She is currently the Professor in Information Systems at the University of Queensland , School of CSEE in Brisbane, Australia and a Visiting Professor at CS Dept at HKUST. She is the head of Information Systems Division and a Deputy Head of the CSEE School. Since 1990 she is involved in research work at the Distributed Systems Technology Center, DSTC Pty Ltd initially as a project leader and since 2000 as a Distinguished Research Fellow. She has published many papers mainly in database and workflows systems area. Prof Orlowska served on many international conferences as a PC Chair and other major roles. She is a member of the Editorial Board of several international journals such as , Int Journal of Data and Knowledge Engineering, Int Journal of Internet and Web Information Systems and others. Since 1994 till 2000 she served as a VLDB Endowment trustee as a Far East representative. Recently she was involved in an innovative workflows systems deployment for e-learning environments where the Flex-eL systems has been developed.