An Intelligent Wizard for Automatic Workflow Modeling

Workflow modeling is playing an increasingly important role in representing end-to-end business process for workflow analysis, integration, automation and optimization purposes. This paper introduces an intelligent tool that automatically generates workflow models based on a set of given user constraints and underlying service capability ontology for production printing domain through an ease-to-use wizard-like interface. Unlike any existing workflow modeling tool, this intelligent wizard does not require the users with technical expertise in process modeling. The wizard-like interface provided in the proposed tool enables business people to easily create workflow models that match the user constraints provided via a set of questionnaire. The resulting workflow model is represented from three view points: service view, product view and device view. This paper discusses the tool´s architecture and key components, such as domain ontology on user constraints and service capability, and ontology-based inference engine that implements the automatic workflow generation algorithm.