Human interactions in business processes

The main objective of BPEL has been to standardize the process automation. BPEL business processes make use of services and externalize their functionality as services. BPEL processes are defined as a collection of activities through which services are invoked. BPEL does not make a distinction between services provided by applications and other interactions, such as human interactions, which are particularly important. Real-world business processes namely often integrate not only systems and services, but also humans.

Human interactions in business processes can be very simple, such as approval of certain tasks or decisions, or complex, such as delegation, renewal, escalation, nomination, chained execution, and so on. Human interactions are not limited to approvals and can include data entries, process monitoring and management, process initiation, exception handling, and so on.

Task approval is the simplest and probably the most common human interaction...