Abstract:An accurate description of the behavior of workflow activities is the basis for controlling workflow processes. Approaches based on states to describing workflow activity behavior are widely adopted in current workflow management systems. However, informal semantic reprsentations of activity states are lack of accuracy and expandability, which leads to low adaptability of workflow management systems. Focus on the diversity and dynamic of business process management requirements, a formal semantic representation for workflow activity states was presented to support the fast reconfiguration of activity states. The relations between activity states and workitem states were firstly analyzed, and then based on which some basic concepts, such as activity state configuration set and universal activity state configuration set, were defined to describe the activity state semantic. By mapping an activity state onto a set of configurations with the same feature, the semantic of the activity state was formally defined. At last, a mechanism for fast reconfiguration of activity states was proposed and its effectiveness was verified by a practical example. The proposed approach can significantly improve the adaptability of workflow management systems in changing business environments.