Finding the critical path in a time-constrained workflow

The concept of the critical path has not been much addressed in a workflow even though it has been studied in many areas of computer engineering such as a directed acyclic graph. In this paper we first specify workflow control constructs which create workflow control structures used to describe business processes. And, we propose a method to find out the critical path in a time-constrained workflow built by the workflow control constructs defined in the paper. Because the concept of the critical path may be fundamental and useful in the context of a workflow, it can be effectively utilized in many workflow issues such as workflow resource management and workflow time management.