Patent ID: 8005779

Claim:
A method for designing workflows and executing business objects through the workflows, comprising: responsive to user inputs defining a workflow in a graphic design area of a workflow management system, designing and displaying the workflow in a graph-based format, wherein the workflow includes a set of steps and a control flow that controls execution of the set of steps; deriving a set of automatically-generated rules from the set of steps and the control flow to create a rule-based format representing the workflow; receiving additional rules entered by a user, the additional rules being combined with the automatically-generated rules to augment the automatically-generated rules; responsive to receiving the additional rules entered by the user, clustering the additional rules in a bottom-up manner to form at least one graphic representation of the workflow including the additional rules; displaying the at least one graphic representation to the user; executing the rule-based format workflow at a server; and during the executing, changing the set of steps and control flow of the workflow responsive to a further user input defining further additional rules and modifying the workflow based on the further additional rules.