Adjustment Strategies for Non-Compliant Process Instances

Enabling changes at both process type and process instance level is an essential requirement for any adaptive process-aware information system (PAIS). Particularly, it should be possible to migrate a (long-)running process instance to a new type schema version, even if this instance has been individually modified before. Further instance migration must not violate soundness; i.e., structural and behavorial consistency need to be preserved. Compliance has been introduced as basic notion to ensure that instances, whose state has progressed too far, are prohibited from being migrated. However, this also excludes them from further process optimizations, which is not tolerable in many practical settings. This paper introduces a number of strategies for coping with non-compliant instances in the context of process change such that they can benefit from future process type changes on the one hand, but do not run into soundness problems on the other hand. We show, for example, how to automatically adjust process type changes at instance level to enable the migration of a higher number of instances. The different strategies are compared and discussed along existing approaches. Altogether, adequate treatment of non-compliant process instances contributes to full process lifecycle support in adaptive PAIS

Change Support in Process-Aware Information Systems - A Pattern-Based Analysis

In today's dynamic business world the economic success of an enterprise increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Process-aware information systems (PAIS) offer promising perspectives in this respect and are increasingly employed for operationally supporting business processes. To provide effective business process support, flexible PAIS are needed which do not freeze existing business processes, but allow for loosely specified processes, which can be detailed during run-time. In addition, PAIS should enable authorized users to flexibly deviate from the predefined processes if required (e.g., by allowing them to dynamically add, delete, or move process activities) and to evolve business processes over time. At the same time PAIS must ensure consistency and robustness. The emergence of different process support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing existing change approaches have made it difficult for PAIS engineers to choose the adequate technology. In this paper we suggest a set of changes patterns and change support features to foster the systematic comparison of existing process management technology with respect to process change support. Based on these change patterns and features, we provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of selected systems from both academia and industry. The identified change patterns and change support features facilitate the comparison of change support frameworks, and consequently will support PAIS engineers in selecting the right technology for realizing flexible PAIS. In addition, this work can be used as a reference for implementing more flexible PAIS

On Utilizing Web Service Equivalence for Supporting the Composition Life Cycle

Deciding on web service equivalence in process-aware service compositions is a crucial challenge throughout the composition life cycle. Restricting such decisions to (activity) label equivalence, however, is not sufficient for many practical applications: if two activities and web services respectively have equivalent labels, does this necessarily mean they are equivalent as well? In many scenarios (e.g., evolution of a composition schema or mining of completed composition instances) other factors may play an important role as well. Examples include context information (e.g., input and output messages) and information on the position of web services within compositions. In this paper, we introduce the whole composition life cycle and discuss specific requirements for web service equivalence along its different phases. We define adequate equivalence notions for the design, execution, analysis, and evolution of service compositions. Main focus is put on attribute and position equivalence. Altogether this paper shall contribute a new understanding and treatment of equivalence notions in service compositions

Realizing Adaptive Process-aware Information Systems with ADEPT2

In dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement new business processes, to enable ad-hoc deviations from the defined business processes on-demand (e.g., by dynamically adding, deleting or moving process activities), and to support dynamic process evolution (i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running process instances). These fundamental requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and robustness of the process-aware information system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed in the ADEPT2 process management system. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation technology for the support of dynamic processes, which enables full process lifecycle management and which can be applied to a variety of application domains

Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems: Challenges, Methods, Technologies

In today’s dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process agility as a competitive advantage to address business trends like increasing product and service variability or faster time to market, and to ensure business IT alignment. Along this trend, a new generation of information systems has emerged—so-called process-aware information systems (PAIS), like workflow management systems, case handling tools, and service orchestration engines. With this book, Reichert and Weber address these flexibility needs and provide an overview of PAIS with a strong focus on methods and technologies fostering flexibility for all phases of the process lifecycle (i.e., modeling, configuration, execution and evolution). Their presentation is divided into six parts. Part I starts with an introduction of fundamental PAIS concepts and establishes the context of process flexibility in the light of practical scenarios. Part II focuses on flexibility support for pre-specified processes, the currently predominant paradigm in the field of business process management (BPM). Part III details flexibility support for loosely specified processes, which only partially specify the process model at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain model parts are deferred to the run-time. Part IV deals with user- and data-driven processes, which aim at a tight integration of processes and data, and hence enable an increased flexibility compared to traditional PAIS. Part V introduces existing technologies and systems for the realization of a flexible PAIS. Finally, Part VI summarizes the main ideas of this book and gives an outlook on advanced flexibility issues. The attached pdf file gives a preview on Chapter 3 of the book which explains the book's overall structure

Data Flow Correctness in Adaptive Workflow Systems

Enterprises must be able to quickly adapt their business processes to react to changes in their environment. Needed business agility is often hindered by the lacking flexibility of contemporary workflow systems. In response to this inflexibility, adaptive workflow systems have emerged, which enable the dynamic adaptation of running workflows. One of the most important challenges in this context is to avoid inconsistencies and errors. So far, approaches providing respective correctness criteria for dynamic workflow change have mainly focused on control flow correctness (e.g., avoidance of deadlocks). However, little attention has been paid to data flow correctness even though this is crucial for any application of dynamic workflow change in practice. Specifically, missing or inconsistent input data of workflow activities, for example, can lead to blocking or breakdown of the underlying workflow system. This paper deals with fundamental challenges related to data flow correctness. We revisit and discuss data flow correctness at different phases of the workflow life cycle (i.e., buildtime and runtime), and show how data flow correctness can be ensured in an efficient way when dynamically changing a workflow

Process Change Patterns: Recent Research, Use Cases, Research Directions

In previous work, we introduced change patterns to foster a systematic comparison of process-aware information systems with respect to change support. This paper revisits change patterns and shows how our research activities have evolved. Further, it presents characteristic use cases and gives insights into current research directions