Improving Flexibility of workflow Management Systems

Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency II

Rinderle-Ma

Dadam

2009

Abstract. Process-aware information systems (PAIS) must be able to deal with uncertainty, exceptional situations, and environmental changes. Needed business agility is often hindered by the lacking flexibility of existing PAIS. Once a process is implemented, its logic cannot be adapted or refined anymore. This often leads to rigid behavior or gaps between real-world processes and implemented ones. In response to this drawback, adaptive PAIS have emerged, which allow to dynamically adapt or evolve the structure of process models under execution. This paper deals with fundamental challenges related to structural process changes, discusses how existing approaches deal with them, and shows how the various problems have been exterminated in ADEPT2 change framework. We also survey existing approaches fostering flexible process support.

Section: Fig 7 Adapting Markings For Wsm Netsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems

Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency II

Rinderle-Ma

Dadam

2009

“…2. Correctness: The ultimate ambition of all adaptive WF meta models must be correctness of dynamic changes [1,2,4,5,6,7,8]; i.e., introducing changes to the runtime system without causing inconsistencies or errors (like deadlocks or improperly invoked activity programs). Therefore, adequate correctness criteria are needed.…”

Section: Completenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A rapidly changing environment and a turbulent market force any company to change their business processes ever more frequently [1]. Process changes become necessary, for example, when new laws come into effect, optimized or restructured business processes are to be implemented, exceptional situations occur, or rapid reactions to a changed market are required.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Evaluation of Correctness Criteria for Dynamic Workflow Changes

Rinderle

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Dadam

2003

Abstract. The capability to dynamically adapt in-progress workflows (WF) is an essential requirement for any workflow management system (WfMS). This fact has been recognized by the WF community for a long time and different approaches in the area of adaptive workflows have been developed so far. They either enable WF type changes and their propagation to in-progress WF instances or (ad-hoc) changes of single WF instances. Thus, at first glance, many of the major problems related to dynamic WF changes seem to be solved. However, this picture changes when digging deeper into the approaches and considering implementation and usability issues as well. This paper presents important criteria for the correct adaptation of running workflows and analyzes how actual approaches satisfy them. At this, we demonstrate the strengths of the different approaches and provide additional solutions to overcome current limitations. These solutions comprise comprehensive correctness criteria as well as migration rules for change realization.

“…In the workflow literature several proposals have been made aiming at adaptive process management (e.g., [29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37]). The ADEPT technology, for example, enables controlled changes at the process type as well as the process instance level (for details see [38,39,40]).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Formal Framework for Adaptive Access Control Models

Rinderle

Journal on Data Semantics IX

Abstract. For several reasons enterprises are frequently subject to organizational change. Respective adaptations may concern business processes, but also other components of an enterprise architecture. In particular, changes of organizational structures often become necessary. The information about organizational entities and their relationships is maintained in organizational models. Therefore the quick and correct adaptation of these models is fundamental to adequately cope with organizational changes. However, model changes alone are not sufficient to guarantee consistency. Since organizational models also provide the basis for defining access rules (e.g., actor assignments in workflow management systems or access rules in document-centered applications) this information has to be adapted accordingly (e.g., to avoid dangling references or non-resolvable actor assignments). Current approaches do not adequately address this problem, which often leads to security gaps and delayed change implementation.In this paper we introduce a formal framework for the controlled evolution of organizational models and related access rules. Firstly, we introduce a set of operators with well-defined semantics for defining and changing organizational models. Secondly, we show how to define access rules based on such models. In this context we also define a notion of correctness for access rules. Thirdly, we present a formal framework for the (semi-automated) adaptation of access rules when the underlying organizational model is changed by exploiting the semantics of the applied changes. Altogether the presented approach provides an important contribution for realizing adaptive access control frameworks.