Agile Workflow Technology and Case-Based Change Reuse for Long-Term Processes

Abstract

The increasing dynamics of today's work impacts the business processes. Agile workflow technology is a means for the automation of adaptable processes. However, the modification of workflows is a difficult task that is performed by human experts. This article discusses the novel approach of agile workflow technology for dynamic, long-term scenarios and on change reuse. First, it introduces new concepts for a workflow modeling language and enactment service, which enable an interlocked modeling and execution of workflows by means of a sophisticated suspension mechanism. Second, it provides new process-oriented methods of case-based reasoning in order to support the reuse of change experience. The results from an experimental evaluation in a real-world scenario highlight the usefulness and the practical impact of this work.

A Case-Based Approach to Business Process Monitoring

“…From the technical viewpoint, as observed in section 2, the graph edit distance measure, that we have adapted in this work, was originally resorted to in [14]. However, with respect to that approach, by focusing just on traces of execution we did not need to consider extensions to the similarity measure able to deal with control flow elements (such as alternatives and iterations).…”

“…For the same reason, we did not insert any penalty for pairs of arcs in different traces with a different input or output action, which is already accounted for by the comparison between pairs of actions themselves. On the other hand, when focusing on linear traces our approach is more general and flexible than the one in [14]. As a matter of fact, we resort to taxonomical knowledge for comparing pairs of actions, so that two different actions do not always have a zero similarity.…”

“…Starting from this observation, a rather simple graph edit distance measure [4] has been proposed and adapted for similarity assessment in workflow change reuse [14,8]. Our approach moves from the same graph edit distance definition, and properly adapts it in order to work on trace comparison.…”

“…[20]), and many examples of CBR-based process change reuse and workflow adaptation support have been proposed (see e.g. [12,10,25,14,15]). …”

Refactoring large process model repositories

“…There are various reasons why exceptions occasionally occur that necessitate such changes [80]. Interestingly, a study of processes in the chip design industry [51] found that actual in-stance changes are often highly similar. This has been confirmed in other domains like healthcare, e-negotiation, and transportation [97].…”