A novel workflow management system for handling dynamic process adaptation and compliance

Modern enterprise organisations rely on dynamic processes. Generally these processes cannot be modelled once and executed repeatedly without change. Enterprise processes may evolve unpredictably according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. However, no mechanism exists to ensure an updated process does not violate any compliance requirements. Typical workflow processes may follow a process definition and execute several thousand instances using a workflow engine without any changes. This is suitable for routine business processes. However, when business processes need flexibility, adaptive features are needed. Updating processes may violate compliance requirements so automatic verification of compliance checking is necessary. The research work presented in this Thesis investigates the problem of current workflow technology in defining, managing and ensuring the specification and execution of business processes that are dynamic in nature, combined with policy standards throughout the process lifycle. The findings from the literature review and the system requirements are used to design the proposed system architecture. Since a two-tier reference process model is not sufficient as a basis for the reference model for an adaptive and compliance workflow management system, a three-tier process model is proposed. The major components of the architecture consist of process models, business rules and plugin modules. This architecture exhibits the concept of user adaptation with structural checks and dynamic adaptation with data-driven checks. A research prototype - Adaptive and Compliance Workflow Management System (ACWfMS) - was developed based on the proposed system architecture to implement core services of the system for testing and evaluation purposes. The ACWfMS enables the development of a workflow management tool to create or update the process models. It automatically validates compliance requirements and, in the case of violations, visual feedback is presented to the user. In addition, the architecture facilitates process migration to manage specific instances with modified definitions. A case study based on the postgraduate research process domain is discussed

Preservation of integrity constraints by workflow

Integrity constraints on data are typically defined when workflow and business process models are developed. Keeping data consistent is vital for workflow execution. Traditionally, enforcing data integrity constraints is left for the underlying database system, while workflow system focuses primarily on performing tasks. This paper presents a new mechanism that turns a workflow into an equivalent one that will preserve integrity constraints. For a given workflow schema (or model) and a given set of data integrity constraints, an algorithm developed in this paper injects additional conditions into the workflow schema that restricts possible execution paths. The modified workflow will guarantee data consistency (i.e., satisfaction of the integrity constraints) whenever the workflow updates the database(s). In addition, we show that our injection mechanism is "conservative complete, i.e., the conditions inserted are weakest possible. By making workflow execution self-behaving, enforcing integrity constraints over multi-databases is avoided, and constraints specific to a workflow can also be enforced effectively. Mechanisms such as this enhance independence of workflow executions from the environment-a much desired property.18 page(s