Enforcement vs. freedom of action an integrated approach to flexible workflow enactment

Abstract

The advantages of today's process management, such as efficiency and quality aspects, are achieved by enforcing detailed models of work processes. However, real world processes can be planned to a limited degree only and sometimes planned parts of the process must be changed, creating a need for additional, unforeseen activities.In this paper, this contradictory situation is tackled by an approach that combines different forms of enforcement of planned parts of a process. The explicit modelling of these different support strategies allows them to be changed if demanded by the situation. An extended enactment strategy gives workers the opportunity to negotiate about changing the current support strategy, giving scope for deviations from the planned process where additional actions are required.

A Survey on the Flexibility Requirements Related to Business Processes and Modeling Artifacts

“…The most recent type of process models [14], [18], [38], [39] is based on the decision-oriented paradigm according to which the successive transformations of the product are looked upon as consequences of decisions. The underlying philosophy is that a process model does not have only to specify the linking of activities or product states but also the intention behind the execution of activities and their linking.…”

“…Accordingly, the workflow enactment service should be able to execute 'incomplete' specifications of process definitions. Thus, it depends on the user decisions for the selection of (i) a process component (dynamic construction of the process instance) [31], (ii) an execution path among several possible ones, (iii) a behavior to associate to a process component (actor, activity, resource, ..) , (iv) a wayof-doing to perform an activity [18] or (v) the strategy to adopt in the interpretation of the process model by the enactment engine [7].…”

“…It is recommended, for approaches using the a priori flexibility, to allow adapting a process instance when the system can not deal with a not anticipated event using its a priori flexibility capacities [1], [7], [14], [18], [21], [27], [38].…”

“…Local: The transformation concerns instances. It is necessary to detect if it can have indirect impacts on other instances [14], [18], [26], [27]. For instance, Adept flex [11] expresses the semantics links existing between process instances.…”

A helpful framework for the organization of the homecare

“…It could be efficient to augment self-controlled work for the users, so that they keep control on the way they want to manage the actions to perform. Freedom of action [12] or better presentation of the tasks to perform with refined agendas or personal worklists [13] are some of the possibilities offered to improve user's control.…”