Optimizing Exception Handling in Workflows Using Process Restructuring

Data & Knowledge Engineering

Rinderle-Ma

2008

495

408

Companies increasingly adopt process-aware information systems (PAISs), which offer promising perspectives for more flexible enterprise computing. The emergence of different process support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing existing approaches enabling PAIS changes have made the selection of adequate process management technology difficult. This paper suggests a set of 18 change patterns and 7 change support features to foster the systematic comparison of existing process management technology in respect to process change support. While the proposed patterns are all based on empirical evidence from several large case studies, the suggested change support features constitute typical functionalities provided by flexible PAISs. Based on the proposed change patterns and features, we provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of selected approaches from both academia and industry. The presented work will not only facilitate the selection of technologies for realizing flexible PAISs, but can also be used as a reference for implementing flexible PAISs.

“…Some of these approaches [77][78][79]52] apply structural adaptations to process instances to deal with the exceptions. By using the adaptation patterns offered by existing systems.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In ADEPT2, for example, respective patterns are not only accessible via a process editor, but can also be invoked via a powerful application programming interface. Several approaches have utilized ADEPT2's interface to implement agents for automated exception handling [77][78][79]52]. …”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Change patterns and change support features – Enhancing flexibility in process-aware information systems

Weber

Data & Knowledge Engineering

Rinderle-Ma

2008

495

408

“…This, in turn, enables us to guarantee soundness when applying the respective change operations (Reichert, 1998a). Preserving soundness will be of particular importance if ad-hoc changes are introduced by end users or -even more challenging -by software agents (Golani, 2006;Bassil, 2004). …”

Section: Ad-hoc Workflow Changes In Adeptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexibility for Distributed Workflows

Enterprise Resource Planning

Bauer

Dadam

2013

This chapter shows how flexibility can be realized for distributed workflows. The capability to dynamically adapt workflow instances during runtime (e.g., to add, delete or move activities) constitutes a fundamental challenge for any workflow management system (WfMS). While there has been significant research on ad-hoc workflow changes and on related correctness issues, there exists only little work on how to provide respective runtime flexibility in an enterprise-wide context as well. Here, scalability at the presence of high loads constitutes an essential requirement, often necessitating distributed (i.e., piecewise) control of a workflow instance by different workflow servers, which should be as independent from each other as possible. This chapter presents advanced concepts and techniques for enabling ad-hoc workflow changes in a distributed WfMS as well. Our focus is on minimizing the communication costs among workflow servers, while ensuring a correct execution behavior as well as correctness of ad-hoc workflow changes at any time.

“…For all instances we need adequate correctness criteria (see [28,32] for respective extensions of compliance and migration strategies). So far, ADEPT2 has been applied in several domains including healthcare, automotive development, construction engineering, logistics, and e-negotiation [1,2,33,34]. While for some applications the provided ADEPT2 clients were sufficient to adequately assist users in adapting their processes [34,1], in other cases specific client components were implemented based on the application programming interfaces offered by ADEPT2.…”

Section: Concurrent Process Adaptationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So far, ADEPT2 has been applied in several domains including healthcare, automotive development, construction engineering, logistics, and e-negotiation [1,2,33,34]. While for some applications the provided ADEPT2 clients were sufficient to adequately assist users in adapting their processes [34,1], in other cases specific client components were implemented based on the application programming interfaces offered by ADEPT2. AgentWork [33], for example, provides a rule-based planning component for the healthcare domain that automatically derives adaptations of patient treatment processes to be applied in a given context.…”

Section: Concurrent Process Adaptationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flexibility in Process-Aware Information 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.