Exceptions occurrence in workflow systems is common. Searching in the past exceptions handlers' records, looking for any similar exception serves as good sources in designing the solution to resolve the exception at hand. In the literature, there are three approaches to retrieve similar workflow exception records from the knowledge base. These approaches are keyword-based approach, concept hierarchies approach and pattern matching retrieval system. However, in a workflow domain, exceptions are often described by workflow participants as a short text using natural language rather than a set of user-defined keywords. Therefore, the above mentioned approaches are not effective in retrieval of relevant information. The proposed approach considers the semantic similarity between the workflow exceptions rather than term-matching schemes, taking account of semantic information and word order information implied in the sentence. Our findings show that sentence similarity measures are capable of supporting the retrieval of relevant information in workflow exception handling knowledge. This paper presents a novel approach to apply sentence similarity measures within the case-based reasoning methodology in workflow exception handling. A data set, comprising of 76 sentence pairs representing instance level workflow exceptions are tested and the results show significant correlation between the automated similarity measures and the human domain expert intuition.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology is being recognized as a new approach to decentralized workflow management systems to overcome the limitation of the current centralized Client/Server workflow management systems. However, the lack of supporting adaptability and exception handling at instance level of this approach seems to be responsible for the weakness of the P2P workflow management systems. Dynamic agents can be used within P2P workflow management systems architecture to facilitate adaptability and exception handling. This paper presents a novel dynamic-agent P2P workflow management system which integrates three major technologies: software agents, P2P networking and workflow systems. The adoption of dynamic agents within P2P network can help in overcoming the adaptability problem, reducing the need for human involvement in exception handling and improves the effectiveness of the P2P workflow management system.

Current inter-organizational cooperation technologies and approaches do not adequately support crossorganizational workflow. These approaches concentrate on automating the public workflow in isolation from the internal workflow management systems inside the cooperating organization. Integrating Peer-topeer (P2P) and workflow technology enables virtual enterprises to dynamically form and dismantle partnerships between organizations workflow management systems. In addition, P2P workflow based systems support various forms of workflow interoperability e. g capacity sharing, chained execution, subcontracting, case transfer, loosely coupled and public to private approach. This paper describes a novel peer-to-peer inter-organizational workflow management framework (P2P inter-org WFMS), which includes workflow advertisement, workflow interconnection, and workflow cooperation. Each organization acts as a workflow peer (WFP) in a virtual enterprise. Sun Microsystems's JXTA P2P networking environment is used for prototype implementation. XPDL (XML Process Definition Languages) is used for process definition as it offers portability between different Process Design tools. The internal WFMS in each organization is being implemented using TIBCO Business Studio ™.

Workflow processes are moving from long-lasting, well-defined, centralised business processes to dynamically changing, distributed business processes with many variants. Existing research concentrates on decentralisation and on adaptability but there is more to be done on adaptability in decentralised workflow systems. The aim of this research is to overcome the limitation of current workflow management systems by moving from a centralised workflow to a flexible decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) workflow system. A P2P workflow management architecture is proposed which offers flexibility, exception handling and dynamic changes to both the workflow process definition and process instance level by applying a range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. An Exception Handling Peer (EHP) captures exceptions, from the workflow peers, characterises the exceptions and applies a recovery policy. Initial prototyping of the system has been carried out using JBoss jBPM whilst the P2P network environment of this prototype is based on Sun MicroSystem's JXTA.