Their usage should follow strategies of simplifying maintenance and reducing modelling work.
Workflow patterns may usually be aggregated as chains and the conditions for starting and terminating must be explicitly defined.
Workflow patterns can be applied in various context, hence the conditions for use must be explicitly defined and shown in order to prevent misinterpretation.
This collection of patterns focuses on one specific aspect of process-oriented application development, namely the description of control flow dependencies between activities in a workflow/process.
They have also been used to evaluate a number of proposed standards, including BPEL, BPMN, UML Activity diagram, XPDL, etc.