Adaptive business rules framework for workflow management

Changing scattered and dynamic business rules in Business Workflow Systems has become a growing problem that hinders the use and configuration of workflow-based applications. There is a gap in the existing research studies which currently focus on solutions that are application specific, without accounting for the universal logical dependencies between the business rules and, as a result, do not support adaptation of the business rules in real time. Design/methodology/approach – To tackle the above problems, this paper adopts a bottom-up approach, which puts forward a component model of the business process workflows and business rules based on purely logical specification which allows incremental development of the workflows and indexing of the rules which govern them during the initial acquisition and real-time execution. Results – The paper introduces a component-based event-driven model for development of business workflows which is purely logic based and can be easily implemented using an object-oriented technology together with a formal model for accounting the business rules dependencies together with a new method for incremental indexing of the business rules controlling the workflows. It proposes a two-level inference mechanism as a vehicle for controlling the business process execution and adaptation of the business rules at real time based on propagating the dependencies between the rules. Originality/value –The major achievement of this research is the universal, strictly logic-based event-driven framework for business process modelling and control which allows automatic adaptation of the business rules governing the business workflows based on accounting for their structural dependencies. An additional advantage of the framework is its support for object-oriented technology which can be implemented with enterprise-level quality and efficiency. Although developed primarily for application in construction industry the framework is entirely domain-independent and can be used in other industries, too

Integration and verification of semantic constraints in adaptive process management systems

Adaptivity in process management systems is key to their successful applicability in practice. Approaches have been already developed to ensure system correctness after arbitrary process changes at the syntactical level (e.g., avoiding inconsistencies such as deadlocks or missing input parameters after a process change). However, errors may be still caused at the semantical level (e.g., violation of business rules). Therefore, the integration and verification of domain knowledge will flag a milestone in the development of adaptive process management technology. In this paper, we introduce a framework for defining semantic constraints over processes in such a way that they can express real-world domain knowledge on the one hand and are still manageable concerning the effort for maintenance and semantic process verification on the other hand. This can be used to detect semantic conflicts (e.g., drug incompatibilities) when modeling process templates, applying ad hoc changes at process instance level, and propagating process template modifications to already running process instances, even if they have been already individually modified themselves; i.e., we present techniques to ensure semantic correctness for single and concurrent changes which are, in addition, minimal regarding the set of semantic constraints to be checked. Together with further optimizations of the semantic checks based on certain process meta model properties this allows for efficiently verifying processes. Altogether, the framework presented in this paper provides the basis for process management systems which are adaptive and semantic-aware at the same time