Human tasks enable human interactions in business processes. Business processes are not generally fully automated and certain activities have to be carried out by humans. Business users whether employees, customers, or suppliers often need to participate in business processes. Examples of human interactions include approval, decision making, error and exception handling and so on. For instance, a human interaction might be necessary for cancelling the order due to product unavailability, increasing the manufacturing of a product due to increase in demand and so on. In a nutshell, human tasks provide a description or speculation of tasks to be performed by humans within business processes.

In this chapter, we will take a closer look at the human tasks and explain the human workflow integration into BPEL processes. In this chapter, we will: