Abstract
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. Especially for long-running business processes it is indispensable to propagate WF type changes to in-progress WF 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 generic framework for the common support of both WF type and WF instance changes. We establish fundamental correctness principles, position formal theorems, and show how WF instances can be automatically and efficiently migrated to a modified WF schema. The adequate treatment of conflicting WF type and WF instance changes adds to the overall completeness of our approach. By offering more flexibility and adaptability the so promising WF technology will finally deliver.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
van der Aalst, W., van Hee, K.: Workflow Management. MIT Press, Cambridge (2002)
Reichert, M., Dadam, P.: ADEPT flex - supporting dynamic changes of workflows without losing control. Int’l J Intelligent Information Systems 10, 93–129 (1998)
Sadiq, S., Marjanovic, O., Orlowska, M.: Managing change and time in dynamic workflow processes. Int’l J Cooperative Information Systems 9 (2000)
Weske, M.: Formal foundation and conceptual design of dynamic adaptations in a workflow management system. In: Proc. HICSS-34, Maui, Hawaii (2001)
Edmond, D., ter Hofstede, A.: A reflective infrastructure for workflow adaptability. Data and Knowlege Engineering 34, 271–304 (2000)
Kochut, K., Arnold, J., Sheth, A., Miller, J., Kraemer, E., Arpinar, B., Cardoso, J.: Intelligen: A distributed workflow system for discovering protein-protein interactions. Distributed and Parallel Databases 13, 43–72 (2003)
Kradolfer, M., Geppert, A.: Dynamic workflow schema evolution based on workflow type versioning and workflow migration. In: Proc. CoopIS 1999, Edinburgh (1999)
Joeris, G., Herzog, O.: Managing evolving workflow specifications. In: Proc. CoopIS, New York, pp. 310–321 (1998)
van der Aalst, W.: Exterminating the dynamic change bug: A concrete approach to support worfklow change. Information Systems Frontiers 3, 297–317 (2001)
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Pernici, B., Pozzi, G.: Workflow evolution. Data and Knowledge Engineering 24, 211–238 (1998)
Ellis, C., Keddara, K., Rozenberg, G.: Dynamic change within workflow systems. In: Proc. Int’l Conf. on Org. Comp. Sys., Milpitas, CA, pp. 10–21 (1995)
Rinderle, S., Reichert, M., Dadam, P.: On dealing with semantically conflicting business process changes. Technical Report UIB-2003-04, University of Ulm (2003)
Agostini, A., De Michelis, G.: Improving flexibility of workflow management systems. In: van der Aalst, W.M.P., Desel, J., Oberweis, A. (eds.) Business Process Management. LNCS, vol. 1806, pp. 218–234. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
van der Aalst, W., Basten, T.: Inheritance of workflows: An approach to tackling problems related to change. Theoretical Computer Science 270, 125–203 (2002)
Fent, A., Reiter, H., Freitag, B.: Design for change: Evolving workflow specifications in ULTRAflow. In: Pidduck, A.B., Mylopoulos, J., Woo, C.C., Ozsu, M.T. (eds.) CAiSE 2002. LNCS, vol. 2348, pp. 516–534. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Rinderle, S., Reichert, M., Dadam, P.: Evaluation of correctness criteria for dynamic workflow changes. In: van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Weske, M. (eds.) BPM 2003. LNCS, vol. 2678, pp. 41–57. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Reichert, M., Rinderle, S., Dadam, P. (2003). On the Common Support of Workflow Type and Instance Changes under Correctness Constraints. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z., Schmidt, D.C. (eds) On The Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2003: CoopIS, DOA, and ODBASE. OTM 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2888. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39964-3_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39964-3_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20498-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39964-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive