Dynamic Reconfiguration of Business Processes

Abstract

Organisations require that their business processes reflect their evolving practices by maintaining compliance with their policies, strategies and regulations. Designing workflows which satisfy these requirements is complex and error-prone. Business process reconfiguration is even more challenging as not only a new workflow must be devised but also an understanding of how the transition between the old and new workflow must be managed. Transition requirements can include both domain independent, such as delayed and immediate change, or user-defined domain specific requirements. In this paper we present a fully automated technique which uses control synthesis to not only produce correct-by-construction workflows from business process requirements but also to compute a reconfiguration process that guarantees the evolution from an old workflow to a new one while satisfying any userdefined transition requirements. The approach is validated using three examples from the BPM Academic Initiative described as Dynamic Condition Response Graphs which we reconfigured for a variety of transitions requirements.

Assured automatic dynamic reconfiguration of business processes

“…The dynamic reconfiguration schema finishes with an extraction process in which the history of one live instance of the current workflow is used to compute from the Reconfiguration Strategy, a DCR graph that describes how reconfiguration of that particular live instance should proceed to satisfy transition requirements and new business rules. This paper extends our previous work Nahabedian et al (2019) in two major ways. Firstly, we provide the extraction method that outputs a declarative workflow model using the same language as the one provided by the user.…”

“…This paper is an extension of Nahabedian et al (2019). Here, we formally define the control problems required to synthesis workflows from DCR graphs and prove that the transformation is sound and complete.…”

“…Here, we formally define the control problems required to synthesis workflows from DCR graphs and prove that the transformation is sound and complete. Additionally, we include a DCR graph extraction method that outputs a model characterizing the reconfiguration activities described by the solution presented in Nahabedian et al (2019) in the form of a Labelled Transition System. This extension allows users to consistently provide and receive feedback in only one language.…”

“…Firstly, we provide the extraction method that outputs a declarative workflow model using the same language as the one provided by the user. Thus, the technique presented in Nahabedian et al (2019) becomes more useful for users as they are not required to understand yet another workflow language.…”

Understanding Uncertainty in Self-adaptive Systems

“…The third group is the use of online techniques to handle unanticipated change as exemplified by online synthesis. Synthesis techniques like [19], [24] can automatically produce a controller given a model of the target system, the set of controllable events, and the controller goal. Nevertheless, supporting online synthesis for unknown unknowns remains an open challenge.…”