On managing business processes variants
Data & Knowledge Engineering
Declarative workflows to efficiently manage flexible and advanced business processes
Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of declarative programming
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
The environments where workflow management systemsare typically used in are constantly changing. It is nearlyimpossible to foresee, at business process design stage,all the combinations of tasks needed to achieve theprocess' goals. Workflow management systems capable ofsupporting dynamic changes on executing instances in aflexible manner are thereby demanded. Formerapproaches have proposed a solution to this issue basedon workflow type versioning and workflow instancemigration. However, the operations that handle themodification of workflow types as well as the migrationalgorithm for workflow instances are tied to a particularrepresentation of workflow types. This means thatwhenever the representation changes, the migrationalgorithms and the modification operations have tochange accordingly. This is a current problem due to theuprising of different specifications for workflow definitionlanguages, which are far away from stabilizing. In thispaper, we address this problem by clearly decoupling themodification operations of workflow types from theinternal structures and algorithms responsible for theinstances' migration. In this manner we enable the use ofdifferent workflow definition languages while keeping thesame internal structures and migration algorithms.