Abstract
Contemporary process management systems support users during the execution of predefined business processes. However, when unforeseen situations occur, which are not part of the process model serving as the template for process execution, contemporary technology is often unable to offer adequate user support. One solution to this problem is to allow for ad-hoc changes to process models, i.e., changes that may be applied on the fly to a running process instance. As opposed to the widespread activity-centric process modeling paradigm, for which the support of instance-specific ad-hoc changes is well researched, albeit not properly supported by most commercial process engines, there is no corresponding support for ad-hoc changes in other process support paradigms, such as artifact-centric or object-aware process management. This article presents concepts for supporting ad-hoc changes in data-centric and data-driven processes, and gives insights into the challenges to be tackled when implementing this kind of process flexibility in the PHILharmonicFlows process execution engine. We evaluated the concepts by implementing a proof-of-concept prototype and applying it to various scenarios. The development of advanced flexibility features is highly relevant for data-centric processes, as the research field is generally perceived as having low maturity compared to activity-centric processes.
Highlights
As one of the major advantages of using process management technology in enterprises, the interactions between users and IT systems can be adapted quickly when changes to real-world business processes occur [1]
Section 5) to improve the overall performance of conducting adhoc changes at runtime. The goal of these evaluations, which provide a major addition to our previous work [11] is to show that ad-hoc changes to object-aware processes are feasible according to the research questions presented in this article
In this study we investigated the need for ad-hoc changes and used them to demonstrate two solutions for flexible intralogistics
Summary
As one of the major advantages of using process management technology in enterprises, the interactions between users and IT systems can be adapted quickly when changes to real-world business processes occur [1] These adaptations are enabled by changing the corresponding process models in a process management system [2]. Process variants exist that occur so rarely that incorporating all their details into the process model would increase complexity at low benefit. In these cases, ad-hoc changes to running process instances become necessary, a topic that has been addressed many times for activity-centric process management systems [3,4,5,6]
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