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Research challenges in business process adaptability

Published: 24 March 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Modern software systems are more and more deployed within moving and continuously changing contexts. It is not easy to consider all the possible contexts configurations/variances at priori, or it is quite cumbersome and error prone to list and program all this variability points at development time. For such a reason different research trends try to develop mechanisms to express, analyse and support the dynamic adaptation of a software system while it is running.
Business Processes show today similar characteristics. In order to keep their competitiveness and quality for products and services, organizations need to be able to adapt to changing contexts. Changes have to be reflected in the software systems supporting the corresponding organizational activities.
In this paper we report the results of a systematic literature review on Business Process Adaptation. The reviewing process lead us to consider 84 papers from the main digital libraries indexing computer science conferences and journals. From the reading and the systematic analysis of these papers we derived some research trends and challenges which have been considered relevant to be able to cover the main sources of adaptation in the definition of effective Business Processes.

References

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R. Bruni, A. Corradini, F. Gadducci, A. Lluch Lafuente, and A. Vandin. A conceptual framework for adaptation. In Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE'12, pages 240--254, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2012. Springer-Verlag.
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A. Bucchiarone, C. A. Mezzina, and M. Pistore. CAptLang: a language for context-aware and adaptable business processes. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-intensive Systems, VaMoS '13, New York, NY, USA, 2013. ACM.
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R. Fang, Z. L. Zou, C. Stratan, L. Fong, D. Marston, L. Lam, and D. Frank. Dynamic Support for BPEL Process Instance Adaptation. In Services Computing, 2008. SCC '08. IEEE International Conference on, volume 1, pages 327--334. IEEE, July 2008.
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Y. Li, C. Lin, S. Pang, and M. Zhou. DPLWN: A Novel Model for Designing and Implementing Dynamic Business Processes and Process Changes. In Computational Science and Its Applications, International Conference on, pages 145--154. IEEE, 2010.
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A. Marconi, M. Pistore, A. Sirbu, H. Eberle, F. Leymann, and T. Unger. Enabling Adaptation of Pervasive Flows: Built-in Contextual Adaptation. In L. Baresi, C.-H. Chi, and J. Suzuki, editors, Service-Oriented Computing, volume 5900 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 445--454. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009.
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D. Moitra and J. Ganesh. Web services and flexible business processes: towards the adaptive enterprise. Information & Management, 42(7): 921--933, Oct. 2005.
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S. Mosser, G. Hermosillo, A. Le Meur, L. Seinturier, and L. Duchien. Undoing Event-Driven Adaptation of Business Processes. In Services Computing (SCC), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, pages 234--241. IEEE, July 2011.
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N. C. Narendra. Flexible Support and Management of Adaptive Workflow Processes. 6(3): 247--262, 2004.
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W. M. P. Van Der Aalst, A. H. M. Ter Hofstede, and M. Weske. Business process management: a survey. In Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Business process management, BPM'03, pages 1--12, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2003. Springer-Verlag.
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K. Vergidis, A. Tiwari, and B. Majeed. Business Process Analysis and Optimization: Beyond Reengineering. Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, IEEE Transactions on, 38(1): 69--82, Jan. 2008.
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M. Weske. Business process management concepts, languages, architectures. Springer, 1 edition, 2007.
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B. Zimmermann and M. Doehring. Patterns for flexible BPMN workflows. In Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, EuroPLoP '11, New York, NY, USA, 2012. ACM.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SAC '14: Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
      March 2014
      1890 pages
      ISBN:9781450324694
      DOI:10.1145/2554850
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 24 March 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. adaptability
      2. business process
      3. systematic litterature review

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      SAC 2014: Symposium on Applied Computing
      March 24 - 28, 2014
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      SAC '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 218 of 939 submissions, 23%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

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      • (2021)What Should Be Focused on When Digital Transformation Hits Industries? Literature Review of Business Management AdaptabilitySustainability10.3390/su13231344713:23(13447)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2021
      • (2018)Adaptable Cross-organizational Unstructured Business Processes via Dynamic Rule-based Semantic NetworkInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-018-9886-zOnline publication date: 1-Nov-2018
      • (2017)Towards Supporting Modeling Variability in E-Learning Application: A Case Study2017 18th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (PDCAT)10.1109/PDCAT.2017.00083(488-494)Online publication date: Dec-2017
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      • (2016)Business Process Verification and Restructuring LTL Formula Based on Machine Learning ApproachComputer and Information Science10.1007/978-3-319-40171-3_7(89-102)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2016
      • (2015)BPFMProceedings of the 2015 IIAI 4th International Congress on Advanced Applied Informatics10.1109/IIAI-AAI.2015.179(34-39)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2015
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