Flexible Business Process Management Using Forward Stepping and Alternative Paths

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 work ‡ow models is limited. Work ‡ow 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 ‡exibility. 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 modi…cations to running instances and provides an e¢ cient 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.

Towards functional safety and security for adaptive and flexible business processes

“…Related work in the field of web services is provided, where a formalisation of Web service composition and the definition of compensation semantics in case of failures using the Event B method is proposed. However, although there is a variety of approaches to exception handling and fault tolerance in business process models as well (see Geist and Illibauer for a comprehensive literature review), the approaches basically either investigate exceptions and their recovery in the context of advanced transaction models, which are too rigid for workflow systems, or are not fully integrated and do not address exception handling in a strict formal, intelligible way . Also, the proprietary frameworks enforced by BPM systems make it hard for users to cope with divergent process definitions or unexpected situations; they might have to undertake actions outside their usual work routines, which notably poses security risks.…”

A Version Management Method for Managing Business Process Changes Based on Version-Stamped Business Process Change Patterns

“…This method can remove the disadvantages of timestamp method. However, in case that existing version is executing, this method cannot cope with the situation when a new version is created and deployed [2,5].…”