Visual Support for Work Assignment in YAWL

A basic function of Process-aware Information Systems (PAISs) is to offer work to resources. The elementary pieces of work are called work items, e.g. “Approve travel request XYZ1234”. Work items are offered to users via so-called work-list handlers, which take care of work distribution and authorisation issues. Typically, PAISs use a so-called “pull mechanism”, i.e. work is offered to all resources that qualify and one resource selects it for execution. Even though resources are free to select any work items they qualify, they should pick the right work items in the right order. The right order is thus balancing resources’ personal needs and the overall benefit of their respective organisations. In order to drive to the right choice, basic information is provided, e.g. task name, due date, etc. To the best of our knowledge (see [1]), commercial and open source PAISs present work lists simply as a list of work items, each with a short textual description. Context-aware systems provide contextual information, but the different viewpoints are not merged together.4 This paper aims at describing the operationalisation of an innovative worklist handler that overcomes this limitation. This worklist handler has been implemented as a component of the YAWL Process Management System5, although it has been conceived as being independent to any particular PAIS. This worklist handler provides participants with a more detailed insight of the context in which processes are carried out. In addition, it aims to provide support for work item selection by taking into account the circumstances and attributes of all of the users currently active. In order to achieve these results, we have introduced the metaphor of maps. A map can be a geographical one (e.g. a map of a university campus), but may also be a process schema, an organisational diagram, a Gantt chart, etc. Work items are then visualised as dots on these maps. By allowing the choice of the map to be configurable, different types of relationships can be shown, thus providing a deeper insight into the context of the work to be performed. Resources may also be shown on maps, e.g. by using their position. Besides the “map metaphor” we also use the “distance metaphor”— from the viewpoint of the user, some work items are close while others are far away. This distance may be geographic, e.g. a field service engineer may be far away from a malfunctioning printer