SIGMOD '87 Proceedings of the 1987 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Adept_flex—Supporting Dynamic Changes of Workflows Without Losing Control
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Special issue on workflow management systems
Exception Handling in Workflow Management Systems
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - special section on current trends in exception handling—part II
Improving Flexibility of Workflow Management Systems
Business Process Management, Models, Techniques, and Empirical Studies
Flexible business process management using forward stepping and alternative paths
BPM'05 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Business Process Management
Data & Knowledge Engineering
Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems
Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency II
Modeling alternatives in exception executions
BPM'07 Proceedings of the 2007 international conference on Business process management
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Exception handling is the process by which a failure in a process is mitigated. Depending on the specifics of an exception, exception handers – specifications of exception handling processes – may range from halting a process, through attempts of activity reactivation, to an identification of an alternative path to successful completion of a process. Designing efficient exception handlers is not a simple task. By their very nature, exceptions are rare events that may result in poor design of exception handlers in terms of cost and logic. In this work we aim at improving exception handling performance in workflow management systems (WfMSs), a task which has been recognized as a fundamental component of WfMSs that is critical to their successful deployment in real-world scenarios. Our approach is based on the observation that when designing a business process as a workflow, a designer has some degree of freedom in streamlining actions. Therefore, we propose process model restructuring as a main tool in reducing the cost of exception handling. We believe that restructuring of a process model, based on exception efficiency consideration, can increase the overall productivity of the business process. Although the rarity of exceptions allows amortizing their costs over time we cannot ignore exception costs altogether. Therefore, we propose a cost-based approach to prioritize their impact on the workflow design. Our main contribution is the provision of a methodology for exception handling optimization at the workflow design phase.