Abstract
Workflow technology has been widely used in business process modelling, automation and reengineering. In order to meet the fast-changing business requirements, to remain competitive in the market, an enterprise may constantly refine the workflow models of its business processes. The most challenging issue in evolution of a workflow model is the handover of its running instances from the old specification to the new specification. Such a handover depends on the semantics of a workflow model as well as the execution information of its running instances. A handover policy, therefore, needs to be specified for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective handover policy specification language. Using this language, a designer can easily specify a handover policy which reflect exactly what a workflow administrator needs to react to when a workflow model evolves. Criteria for the correct specification of handover policies are also addressed. Finally, a framework for automating handover of workflow instances is presented.
The work reported in this paper has been funded in part by the Cooperative Research Centres Program through the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet of the Commonwealth Government of Australia.
Work done partially while the author was at the Distributed Systems Centre, Brisbane, Australia
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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Liu, C., Orlowska, M.E., Li, H. (1998). Automating handover in dynamic workflow environments. In: Pernici, B., Thanos, C. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1413. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054224
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0054224
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