Adept_flex—Supporting Dynamic Changes of Workflows Without Losing Control
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Special issue on workflow management systems
Inheritance of workflows: an approach to tackling problems related to change
Theoretical Computer Science
Dynamic Workflow Schema Evolution Based on Workflow Type Versioning and Workflow Migration
COOPIS '99 Proceedings of the Fourth IECIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems
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Workflow schema are constantly changing [6][7] driven by new customer requirements or business processes re-engineering. Schema evolution is less of a problem when no work-flow is active, which could be achieved by waiting until all workflows are terminated, or by aborting active ones. These are however not viable solutions, because workflows can be of long duration and comprise considerable amounts of work. This results in a number of variants that may become problematic to manage especially when creating new instances of the schema. However, many of these variants can be merged together to reduce the number of templates to choose from while instantiating a new workflow instance. Merging can be accomplished only when two workflows are compatible or conformant. In this effort we aim at solving the problem of defining workflow conformance using OO concepts of inheritance and merging conformant workflows.The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We first formulate the problem and then present our solution which is based on task inheritance. We finally present some conclusions and opportunities for future work.