A Context-Aware Architecture for Realizing Business Process Adaptation Strategies Using Fuzzy Planning

Abstract

Business competency emerges in flexibility and reliability of services that an enterprise provides. To reach that, executing business processes on a context-aware business process management suite which is equipped with monitoring, modeling and adaptation mechanisms and smart enough to react properly using adaptation strategies at runtime, are a major requisite. In this paper, a context-aware architecture is described to bring adaptation to common business process execution software. The architecture comes with the how-to-apply methodology and is established based on process standards like business process modeling notation (BPMN), business process execution language (BPEL), etc. It follows MAPE-K adaptation cycle in which the knowledge, specifically contextual information and their related semantic rules — as the input of adaptation unit — is modeled in our innovative context ontology, which is also extensible for domain-specific purposes. Furthermore, to support separation of concerns, we took apart event-driven adaptation requirements from process instances; these requirements are triggered based on ontology reasoning. Also, the architecture supports fuzzy-based planning and extensible adaptation realization mechanisms to face new or changing situations adequately. We characterized our work in comparison with related studies based on five key adaptation metrics and also evaluated it using an online learning management system case study.