A Hypermedia Middleware for Process Enactment and Adaptation

Abstract

Dynamic business process management incorporates the capabilities needed to deal with the fast-paced change inherent in today's business processes. While process-aware information systems (PAIS) face an increasing challenge to dynamically adapt running processes to context changes, support for such dynamic adaptation during process enactment remains limited. Furthermore, while the use of web service APIs for enterprise application integration (EAI) and cloud accessibility has garnered broad community support, current PAIS lack a standardized API and often require use of their proprietary clients or APIs. In this paper, we explore the use of hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOAS) for process enactment and process adaptation. Our approach Adapting Processes via Processes using hypermedia (AProProh) situates a HATEOAS-based middleware between RESTful clients and heterogeneous PAIS that can dynamically guide a PAIS-agnostic process client in the navigation, enactment, and adaptation of process instances. Dynamically generated hypermedia enables clients to dynamically apply valid adaptations and adjust their process navigation dynamically to a changed process model while supporting long-running operational requests. A case study based on a prototype realization shows the viability of the approach for supporting dynamic process navigation and process adaptation and characterizes its performance.