Abstract
The abilty to continuously revise business practices is essential to organizations aiming at reducing their costs and increasing their revenues. Rapid and continuous changes to business processes result in less control over the executed activities. As a result, the ability of process designers to produce solid, well-validated workflow models is limited. Workflow management systems (WfMSs), serving as the main vehicle of business process execution, should recognize these risks and become more dynamic to allow the required business flexibility. In this paper, we propose a dynamic mechanism that allows backtracking and forward stepping at an instance level. This mechanism analyzes the feasibility of applying certain modifications to running instances and provides an efficient algorithm that avoids redundant operation activation. We believe that this mechanism can bolster the ability of a business process management system to deal with unexpected situations and to resolve, in runtime, scenarios in which such resolution both is called for and does not violate any business process constraints. Throughout this paper, we use the paradigm of Web services to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed mechanism.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Agostini, A., De Michelis, G.: Improving flexibility of workflow management systems. In: van der Aalst, W., Oberweis, J. (eds.) BPM: Models, Techniques, and Empirical Studies, pp. 218–234. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Agrawal, R., Gunopulos, D., Leymann, F.: Mining process models from workflow logs. In: Schek, H.-J., Saltor, F., Ramos, I., Alonso, G. (eds.) EDBT 1998. LNCS, vol. 1377, pp. 469–483. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Specification: Business process execution language for web services version 1.1, http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ws-bpel/
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Paraboschi, S., Pozzi, G.: Specification and implementation of exceptions in workflow management systems. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 24(3), 405–451 (1999)
Du, W., Davis, J., Shan, M.C.: Flexible specification of workflow compensation scopes. In: GROUP, pp. 309–316. ACM Press, New York (1997)
Eder, J., Liebhart, W.: Workflow recovery. In: CoopIS, pp. 124–134 (1996)
Eder, J., Liebhart, W.: Contributions to exception handling in workflow management. In: Burkes, O., Eder, J., Salza, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, Valencia, Spain, March 1998, pp. 3–10 (1998)
Gaaloul, W., Bhiri, S., Godart, C.: Discovering workflow transactional behavior from event-based log. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z. (eds.) OTM 2004. LNCS, vol. 3290, pp. 3–18. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Golani, M., Pinter, S.S.: Generating a process model from a process audit log. In: van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Weske, M. (eds.) BPM 2003. LNCS, vol. 2678, pp. 136–151. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Hagen, C., Alonso, G.: Exception handling in workflow management systems. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 26(10), 943–958 (2000)
Hwang, G.H., Lee, Y.C., Wu, B.Y.: A new language to support flexible failure recovery for workflow management systems. In: Favela, J., Decouchant, D. (eds.) CRIWG 2003. LNCS, vol. 2806, pp. 135–150. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Kamath, M., Ramamritham, K.: Failure handling and coordinated execution of concurrent workflows. In: ICDE, pp. 334–341. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos (1988)
Reichert, M., Dadam, P.: Adept f lex-supporting dynamic changes of workflows without losing control. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS) 10(2), 93–129 (1998)
Rinderle, S., Reichert, M.: Peter Dadam. Correctness criteria for dynamic changes in workflow systems - a survey. Data Knowl. Eng. 50(1), 9–34 (2004)
Sadiq, S., Marjanovic, O., Orlowska, M.E.: Managing Change and Time in Dynamic Workflow Processes. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 9(1-2), 93–116 (2000)
van der Aalst, W.M.P., et al.: Advance workflow patterns. In: Etzion, O., Scheuermann, P. (eds.) CoopIS 2000. LNCS, vol. 1901, pp. 18–29. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Worflow management coalition. the workflow reference model, wfmc-tc-1003 (1995)
workflow management coalition, interface 5 - audit data specification. technical report wfmc-tc-1015 issue 1.1. workflow management coalition (1998)
Wohed, P., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Dumas, M., ter Hostede, A.H.M.: Analysis of web services composition languages: The case of bpel4ws. In: Song, I.-Y., Liddle, S.W., Ling, T.-W., Scheuermann, P. (eds.) ER 2003. LNCS, vol. 2813, pp. 200–215. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Specification: Web services description language (wsdl) version 2.0, http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Golani, M., Gal, A. (2005). Flexible Business Process Management Using Forward Stepping and Alternative Paths. In: van der Aalst, W.M.P., Benatallah, B., Casati, F., Curbera, F. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3649. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11538394_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11538394_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28238-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31929-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)