Process Flexibility

Dr. Michael Adams gave a talk in the Computer Science Colloquium at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University.

Abstract

Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) seek to bring key benefits to organisations through the modelling of structured business processes from which well-defined executable process instances can be derived. However, the process definition frameworks employed by BPMSs often make it difficult to support dynamic evolution and adaptation (i.e. modifying process enactments during execution) following unexpected or developmental change, and to handle deviations from the process model at runtime, even though it has been shown that such ‘exceptions’ are a common occurrence during almost all process enactments.

This colloquium will begin with a brief re-examination of the principles that underpin business process technologies, including the difficulties faced when adapting processes. Then, a set of principles derived from Activity Theory will be presented, which form the basis of a novel approach that provides extensive support for dynamic and extensible flexibility, evolution and exception handling. An implementation in the YAWL open-source BPMS, together with the benefits offered by the approach, will be discussed and demonstrated.

You can see the talk in this Video.