Reducing Exception Handling Complexity in Business Process Modeling and Implementation: The WED-Flow Approach

Abstract

Today's enterprises reevaluate and adjust their business processes at a very high frequency, which presents a non-trivial challenge to classic BPM methodology. In particular, the dynamic nature of exception handling may generate highly significant costs when business processes are modeled and implemented statically based on formal frameworks (e.g., process algebra and Petri nets). In this work we introduce the WED-flow (Workflow, Event processing, and Data-flow) approach, a novel concept for modeling and implementation of business processes that significantly reduces the complexity of exception handling--quantitatively, as compared to current approaches. WED-flows explicitly integrate events, data, conditions, and transitions by capturing data instances (future, current, and historical) as data states, which enables incremental business process development. More generally, this paper provides a conceptual basis and guidelines for capturing, processing, and storing event-handling environments. Consequently, information systems that implement business processes as WED-flows are truly dynamic and no longer time-invariant by design.