Go4Flex Project Overview

The Go4Flex (Goal-orientation for Flexible business processes) project aims at supporting the agile definition and execution of workflows. The available modeling approaches for describing business processes emphasize the activities to be performed and their respective ordering. This view is limited and does not take into account other important facets of business processes, like objectives behind the process and the context it is executed in. This inflexibility and concreteness of business process specifications may lead to problems regarding process evolution and new process variants. Together with the industrial cooperation partner Daimler AG the Go4Flex project strives to develop new approaches for modelling and executing business processes, which will be applied practically within the car production and logistics application domain.

Project Partners

Go4Flex is a DFG-funded technology transfer project, which is carried out in close cooperation with the Daimler AG.

Project Approach

In the project it will be analyzed how current workflow modeling languages can be enriched by agent-oriented concepts in order to enhance their expressiveness. It is especially intended to use BDI agent concepts to increase the abstractness of the descriptions. The achieved abstractness will help making process descriptions more agile and flexible in their use. This will allow process descriptions to evolve and process variants to emerge without having to change the underlying base processes. On the one hand the project builds on business process research of the Daimler AG, which laid the foundation for agile processes and their goal-oriented concepts. On the other hand the projects profits from the research in the area of BDI agents systems of the University of Hamburg.