The ADEPT Project: A Decade of Research and Development for Robust and Flexible Process Support - Challenges and Achievements

This paper gives insights into the ADEPT project. Its target was to develop a next generation process management technology, which is by orders of magnitudes more powerful and flexible than contemporary process management systems. The ADEPT technology should provide advanced features and properties within one system, which seem to exclude each other, but which are required for the support of a broad spectrum of processes: ease-of-use for end users and system developers, high flexibility through the support of non-trivial ad-hoc deviations at the process instance level, quick implementation of process changes through process schema evolution, and correctness guarantees enabling robust execution of implemented processes. This paper describes the background and the real-world cases which motivated our research. It further explains the technological challenges we faced, describes the solutions we elaborated, and discusses the current status of the ADEPT project

Towards a New Dimension in Clinical Information Processing (Keynote)

Process-oriented information systems can be very valuable for the clinical personnel since they may actively support the processes in a hospital. By offering tasks right in time and when all information is available to perform them, and by obeying deadlines and other time constraints, it reduces the administrative overhead. Today’s WF technology is still too limited in order to be broadly applicable in this scenario. However, research in WF technology is making quick progress. In the foreseeable future one can expect very powerful WfMS to appear at the market place, offering a powerful platform for implementing process-oriented information systems, also in the clinical domain. This paper sketches the ADEPT WfMS prototype, which is among the functionally most powerful WfMS and proves that one can really build systems of this kind which offer all this functionality within one system

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

A Formal Framework For Workflow Type And Instance Changes Under Correctness Constraints

The capability to rapidly adapt in-progress workflows (WF) is an essential requirement for any workflow system. Adaptations may concern single WF instances or a WF type as a whole. While changes of single instances often have to be applied in an ad-hoc manner, type changes become necessary to adapt to evolving business processes. Especially for longrunning processes it is indispensable to propagate type changes to running instances as well. Very challenging in this context is to correctly adapt a (potentially large) collection of WF instances, which may be in different states and to which various ad-hoc changes may have been previously applied. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for the support of both, WF type and WF instance changes. We establish general correctness principles and show how WF instances can be automatically and efficiently migrated to a modified WF schema. We point out that our approach exceeds existing adaptation models in formal foundation, completeness, and usability