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Abstract. Process-oriented support of collaborative work is an important challenge today. At first glance, Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) seem to be very suitable tools for realizing team-work processes. However, such processes have to be frequently adapted, e.g., due to process optimizations or when process goals change. Unfortunately, runtime adaptability still seems to be an unsolvable problem for almost all existing WfMS. Usually, process changes can be accomplished by modifying a corresponding (graphical) workflow (WF) schema. Especially for long-running processes, however, it is extremely important that such changes can be propagated to already running WF instances as well, but without causing inconsistencies and errors. The paper presents a general and comprehensive correctness criterion for ensuring compliance of in-progress WF instances with a modified WF schema. For different kinds of WF schema changes, it is precisely stated, which rules and which information are needed at mininum for satisfying this criterion.

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Companies are developing a growing interest in aligning their information systems in a process-oriented way. However, current processaware information systems (PAIS) fail to meet process flexibility requirements, which reduces the applicability of such systems. To overcome this limitation PAIS should capture the whole process life cycle and all kinds of changes in an integrated way. In this paper we present such a holistic approach providing full process life cycle support by combining the ADEPT framework for dynamic process changes with the concepts and methods provided by case-based reasoning (CBR) technology. This allows expressing the semantics of process changes, their memorization and their reuse to perform similar changes in the future. If the same or similar process instance changes occur frequently, potential process type changes are suggested to the process engineer. The process engineer can then perform a schema evolution and migrate running instances to the new schema version by using the ADEPT framework. Finally, the casebase related to the old schema version is migrated as well.

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