Robust and Flexible Error Handling in the AristaFlow BPM Suite

Abstract

Process-aware information systems will be not accepted by users if rigidity or idleness due to failures comes with them. When implementing business processes based on process management technology one fundamental goal is to ensure robustness of the resulting process-aware information system. Meeting this goal becomes extremely complicated if high flexibility demands need to be fulfilled. This paper shows how the AristaFlow BPM Suite assists process participants in coping with errors and exceptional situations in a flexible and robust way. In particular, we focus on novel error handling procedures and capabilities using the flexibility provided by ad-hoc changes not shown in other context so far.

Democratizing Business Process Management: Empowering Process Participants to Contribute to the Enactment of Business Processes

“…described by Weber et al [17] This includes the capability of the PAIS to formulate restrictions and access control with respect to runtime deviations. Current tool support for the handling of unanticipated change [36] exists, but does not facilitate the modeling from the process participants perspective. Adoptions of these concepts for S-BPM have been touched by Gottanka [37] and Rothschädl [38] but up to now there is not consistent tool support existing.…”

Supporting adaptiveness of cyber-physical processes through action-based formalisms

“…Strong support for structural adaptation is provided by the ADEPT system and its evolutions [55,47,56,57,37]. However, while a good level of support can be provided to ensure correctness and compliance when structural adaptation is performed, the degree of automation is generally limited to manual ad hoc changes performed by experienced users [61].…”

Modeling and Enacting Complex Data Dependencies in Business Processes

“…Process engines such as Activiti [4], Bonita [5] or AristaFlow [12] are able to enact the control flow of a process and to allocate required resources based on a given process model in an automated fashion. Also simple data dependencies can be enacted from a process model, for example, that an activity can only be executed if a particular data object is in a particular state.…”

“…CorePro [14], the Object-Process Methodology [8], Object-Centric Process Modeling [18], and the Artifact-Centric approach [6] define processes in terms of object life cycles with various kinds of object interaction. Only artifacts support all notions of variable granularity (12), though it is given in a declarative form that cannot always be realized [7]. In Case Handling [2], process execution follows updating data such that particular goals are reached in a flexible manner.…”