Resolving Business Process Interference via Dynamic Reconfiguration

Domain-independent planning for services in uncertain and dynamic environments

“…Nevertheless, this approach does not consider problems occurring at a regularly executing process due to the use of inaccurate data. In [van Beest, Bulanov, Wortmann and Lazovik, 2010], a runtime intervention approach is proposed to repair BPs upon interference. However, the design-time specification of the required IPs still requires an extensive manual effort.…”

“…Such outcomes may refer to repetition of activities that have already been fulfilled by some other process (e.g., multiple orders or invoices), proceeding to activities based on obsolete information (e.g., delivering a product to some address that is not valid anymore), or disregarding events that call for compensation activities or the process to hold (e.g., some necessary condition ceases to hold). In [van Beest, Bulanov, Wortmann and Lazovik, 2010], the authors propose a runtime approach to address the problems caused by interference in highly dynamic service-oriented environments. The approach bases on annotating the BP with dependency scopes and triggering predefined intervention processes to recover from inconsistencies that are discovered during execution.…”

“…In such a setting, as realized by the emergent paradigms of Service Oriented Architecture and cloud computing, BPs can no longer be considered in isolation, since disregarding their interdependencies with external actors and other processes may lead to inconsistent situations. The situation where data can be simultaneously accessed and modified by different processes that are running in parallel is referred to as process interference [Xiao and Urban, 2007;van Beest, Bulanov, Wortmann and Lazovik, 2010]. Process interference occurs far more often than most people realize.…”

“…Consequently, neither of these solutions is suitable for a highly-dynamic and distributed environments. In [van Beest, Bulanov, Wortmann and Lazovik, 2010;van Beest et al, 2012], a runtime mechanism is proposed, where vulnerable parts of the process are monitored in order to manage interferences by employing intervention processes. Dependency scopes (DS) are used to specify critical sections of the BP, whose correct execution relies on the accuracy of a volatile process variable, i.e., a variable that can be changed externally during the execution of the process.…”

Variability in business processes: Automatically obtaining a generic specification

“…1, two excerpts 1 are shown of distinct variants of a municipality process. 2 In both variants, F occurs after D eventually (i.e. some activities may occur in between), but the order of activities in the second variant is different: E may be followed by F eventually, but in that case U is to be executed first.…”