Hi Iokje,
I would map the items to a SharePoint list as separate rows and run the workflows off of those. qRules provides mapping to SharePoint. It takes a few minutes to get the mapping from XML to ShP list configured but after that it's smooth sailing.
You can reference your items in a repeating table using xpath. Just use brackets to extract the nth item. For example item[3]\field will extract the field node from the 3rd item row. You can also use count(../preceding-sibling::item)+1 to get the current number of the row you are on.
Good luck