F Hayden’s scientific contributions

First generation process support for Collaborative Systems, Workflow, does not support open-ended human activities like problem solving and design. The second generation, Business Process Management (BPM), does permit flexibility. But this introduces a new problem: most public processes are not fixed structures of simple atomic messages, but flexible sets of complex extended transactions in which the number of possible process loops rapidly tends towards infinity. We illustrate this by reference to concurrent engineering, where interactions generally involve several parties, contain processing spread over multiple systems on different platforms owned by different organizations, and require a number of iterations to complete successfully. We describe the problem in detail, present a general solution as a pattern of transactions and dependencies, show the inherent requirement for a notion of transaction that is different from that found in database systems, and provide a process representation for the model which can be implemented directly.