YAWL has many features that set it apart from other systems
CONTROL FLOW - YAWL offers comprehensive support for the control-flow patterns. It is simply the most powerful process specification language for capturing control-flow dependencies.
DATA PERSPECTIVE - The data perspective in YAWL is captured through the use of XML Schema, XPath and XQuery. All XML Schema data types are supported, allowing the definition of reusable data documents that are easily validated for correctness.
RESOURCE PERSPECTIVE- YAWL offers the most comprehensive support for the established resource patterns. Delegate, reallocate, skip, pile and more!
FORMAL FOUNDATION - The YAWL language has a proper formal foundation. This makes its specifications unambiguous and supports automated verification. YAWL offers two distinct approaches to verification, one based on Reset nets, the other based on transition invariants through the WofYAWL editor plug-in.
CONCISENESS - For all its expressiveness, YAWL offers relatively few constructs (compare this for example to BPMN).
FLEXIBILITY - YAWL offers unique support for dynamic workflow through the Worklets approach. Workflows can thus evolve over time to meet new and changing requirements.
EXCEPTION HANDLING - YAWL offers full support for handling exceptions that may occur during process execution, for both those that were and those that were not anticipated at design time.
EASY DEPLOYMENT - YAWL aims to be straightforward to deploy. It offers a number of automatic installers and an intuitive graphical design environment. YAWL also occupies a very small footprint, and can be easily configured to work with many different database systems (including Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, MySQL, Sybase, etc.)
EXTENSIBILITY - YAWL's service-oriented architecture means that exisitng components can be extended or replaced, and new components easily added. This means that process activities (tasks) can be performed by human participants, web services, external applications or Java code.
DYNAMIC FORMS - Browser-based forms may be defined to display activity data to human participants, but YAWL also provides for the dynamic generation of forms using the data document defined for the activity. This is particularly useful for rapid prototyping.
