Support Tasks for Pervasive Workflows

Pervasive workflows focus on encoding human-centric processes in pervasive domains, such as patient care. One of the main characteristics of these processes is that they have a number of support tasks, which are recommended but not mandatory. However support tasks’ initiations are dependent not only on intra-workflow events, but mainly on inter-workflow and external contextual events. Current workflow models, however, do not address the issue of encoding task instantiations as a result of narrative of contextual events, nor do they support the notion of sharing a task between different processes. This paper presents a language for encoding support tasks initiations based on C+. Our approach is divorced from any particular workflow model and can be used to complement the current workflow models. Furthermore, we also introduce two support task modalities, should and must, to differentiate between their urgencies. However, based on the context these modalities can change dynamically and are not static like the concept of a task.