Tasks and Assignments in Case Management Models

The recent standard CMMN presents an approach to deal with situations, referred to as cases, that call for more flexibility than that offered by traditional control-flow based approaches. The information (documents and data) needed by a case is collected in a hierarchical structure called case file. The advancement of a case is based on the execution of the tasks shown in the case process model; the determination of the tasks to be carried out takes place through human decisions or events (e.g., those related to changes in the case file). However, the standard does not explain how the actual assignments of tasks to the participants in the case are generated. This paper tries to fill the gap by presenting a more detailed treatment of assignments, and by proposing an extension to the CMMN notation. This extension enables the features of assignments to be inferred from the case process model; moreover, it allows for the representation of the dataflow between tasks. There are two major benefits: one is to show the types of the inputs of the assignments, and the other is the possibility of determining the assignees of tasks as a function of the input entities. The notation is illustrated with the help of an example that concerns the handling of the papers submitted to a conference.