Towards Case-Based Adaptation of Workflows

Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2000

This paper discusses the theme of workflow system adaptability in relation to process modeling. Starting from a discussion on the role of formal constructs in cooperation, the main claim is that adaptability involves different dimensions of process modeling. These dimensions concern the possibility to flexibly combine a rich set of basic categories in order to obtain the most suitable language for modeling the target business process and the work practices around it; to take into account various levels of visibility of the contexts of definition and use of a process model; and finally to allow for temporary as well as permanent modifications of the process itself. Ariadne, a notation conceived for the above purpose, is illustrated by means of a working example. Moreover, the paper presents the main design principles governing Ariadne's implementation.

2005

ABSTRACT Today, companies–large and small–can select Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) to support their business processes. When processes are critical, it is fundamental that WfMS infrastructures continue to provide pre-established service levels to users in the face of disruptions. Adaptation ad-dresses precisely this issue. Current architectures do not incorporate adequate solutions that enhance WfMSs' adaptation.

Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management, Proceedings of the First International Conference, October 30-31, 1996, Basel, Switzerland, 1996

This paper proposes some ideas for the enhancement of the flexibility and adaptability of workflow systems. The flexibility and adaptability problem is discussed from two perspectives, namely design and evolution of workflow software from a system perspective as well as redesign and runtime on-the-fly modification of workflow models from an application perspective. We argue that based on a systematic management of workflow resources including workflow models, software components, persons and roles, as well as data and documents, workflow systems can be engineered from these two perspectives convergently. A new process modelling language, called Higher-Order Object Nets (HOON), is discussed. The intended uses of HOON are not only to directly describe real-world business processes but also to serve as an overall control skeleton of the underlying software components supporting individual business activities. Besides inheriting the basic features of Petri nets, HOON incorporate mechanisms which enhance the structural flexibility of Petri nets through dynamic binding of resources, and support reuse and composition of submodels in an object-oriented way. Concerning systems design and evolution, a process-model-driven framework for developing configurable workflow systems is presented. The framework, which is based on HOON and the distributed object computing technology CORBA, can serve as the system core for a variety of workflow systems and remain stable in the process of system evolution, in which software components and process models are all subject to modification and substitution.

2003

The environments where workflow management systems are typically used in are constantly changing. It is nearly impossible to foresee, at business process design stage, all the combinations of tasks needed to achieve the process' goals. Workflow management systems capable of supporting dynamic changes on executing instances in a flexible manner are thereby demanded. Former approaches have proposed a solution to this issue based on workflow type versioning and workflow instance migration. However, the operations that handle the modification of workflow types as well as the migration algorithm for workflow instances are tied to a particular representation of workflow types. This means that whenever the representation changes, the migration algorithms and the modification operations have to change accordingly. This is a current problem due to the uprising of different specifications for workflow definition languages, which are far away from stabilizing. In this paper, we address this problem by clearly decoupling the modification operations of workflow types from the internal structures and algorithms responsible for the instances' migration. In this manner we enable the use of different workflow definition languages while keeping the same internal structures and migration algorithms.

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing and Multimedia - MoMM '08, 2008

Recently, workflow has been employed in pervasive computing systems to orchestrate and provide services to the users. Since pervasive computing systems emphasise context-awareness and adaptability, these two features must be included in the workflow mechanism in order to utilise workflow in pervasive environment. In this paper we present various existing approaches to adaptation in context-aware workflow. These approaches are compared based on the common adaptation characteristics identified from our study. Lastly, we discuss and point out the future challenges of predictive adaptation for context-aware workflows.

2020

The main goal of the presented paper is to propose a method for adaptation of the user interface of workflow software to increase its efficiency, reduce the number of errors, and improve its UX. The authors assumed that the system adaptation will be achieved by application to intelligent methods for modeling user as well as system. In order to do this, a special tool for data gathering has been designed and in the next steps of the research, this tool will be also implemented in a real environment. A unique value of the paper is that after many years of theoretical research, the first attempt to implement a practical solution for self-adapting and the personalized interface for workflow systems was done.

ZEUS, 2012

A dynamic and complex process environment forces the automated execution and monitoring of processes to face a lot of hard problems. This paper shows how the execution of agile workflows can be assisted by AI planning techniques. In contrast to previous approaches, this method allows for an online adaption of simple process models to changes in the process environment. It can handle a manifold of unexpected events and guarantees the soundness and completeness of the adapted workflow.

Computer systems science and …, 2000

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Complex Information Systems, 2016

Workflow systems such as they are today do not provide sufficient flexibility needed to deal with certain situations that may arise during the execution, especially in critical environments such as medical systems and banking systems. In this context, this paper treat the adaptive workflow based on Meta-Model approach and components-based software approach. These provide granularity, flexibility and reliability needed for effective and safe development of the workflow. The work is both in terms of the development process and in terms of the support platform, which should ensure the adaptability and propose a generic componentoriented framework to build, run and develop dynamic workflow templates. Our research objectives are: First, the proposal of a proper workflow development approach that takes into account the evolution of these systems appearance. Then the realization of a framework environment that takes advantage of the component approach and the meta-model approach and its features.

1999

Dynamic evolution and adaptation of workflow models due to process (re)engineer ing activities and dynamic changing situations of the real process is one of the most important challenges in workflow management. In this paper, we present an approach for the management of evolving workflow specifications which copes with the evolution of a w orkflow schema and the dynamic modification of