Resource Patterns and Work Distribution

A number of patterns are available to model how you want work to be distributed to resources. Resources are the people who carry out the work, and are represented in TIBCO Business Studio by participants. How these patterns are interpreted depends on your runtime environment, which may not support all the patterns.

Note: The Workflow Patterns initiative (a joint effort of Eindhoven University of Technology and Queensland University of Technology) provides a conceptual basis for process technology. Their research identifies numerous patterns that can be supported by a workflow language or a business process modeling language. Many of these patterns are supported in TIBCO Business Studio. For more information about the Workflow Patterns initiative, see:

http://www.workflowpatterns.com/index.php

To support the modeling of workflow patterns, the following sections are available on the Resource tab in the Properties view:

  • Resources (user and manual tasks)
  • Distribution Strategy (message events and user tasks)
  • Piling (user and manual tasks)
  • Separation of Duties (user and manual tasks)
  • Retain Familiar (user and manual tasks)
    Note: Resource patterns do not apply to tasks within a pageflow process because pageflow processes do not generate work items.
    Note: The section Calendar Reference allows you to define an alternative to the system calendar.

    Enter a Calendar alias in text (content assist will provide aliases that have been used previously in the workspace) or a reference to a process data field that will provide the Calendar alias at runtime.

    The information you enter is subsequently used by the Calendar gadget in Openspace. See the TIBCO Openspace User Guide and the TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM - BPM Developer's Guide for more infomation on using alternative calendars.

    This information can refer to a base or an overlay calendar.

In addition to the patterns on the Resource tab, you can also use Chaining, which is configured on an embedded sub-process (see Chained Execution).

Note: All items in a chained group need to be in the same embedded sub-process, at the same level as the embedded sub-process. You cannot use chaining with nested sub-processes.

You can also access the Retain Familiar and Separation of Duties resource patterns by selecting tasks, right-clicking, and selecting Resource Patterns: