Service Workflow: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends

Workflow is used to support and connect business processes (BP) in organizations. Historically, it is used to define the control of how tasks are coordinated and executed. Its importance has been continuously increasing with the incorporation of rapidly developed Service-oriented Architecture (SoA), Blockchain, and Internet-of-Thing (IoT); new information technologies have expanded the coverage of workflow across various applications. Workflows often interact with services, where SoA is a key driver to smoot service discovery and provide standards for interoperation. In decentralized collaborative environments, a workflow often deals with disparate services dynamically and interacts with services on demand. This not only unlocks the potentials of workflow applications in business process managements (BPM), but also precipitates significant challenges and has brought considerable attentions to the research community. This paper investigates the state-of-the-art of service workflow modelling and enabling technologies. It begins with the identification and examination of workflow and IoT characteristics; it proposes a workflow architecture to classify existing works on service workflows, and it summarizes the methods for workflow modeling, service interoperation to identify the limitations of existing works and clarify future research directions in using service workflows.