Robust and Reliable Process-Aware Information Systems

Abstract

Over recent years, several sophisticated Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) have been proposed for managing business processes and automating large-scale scientific (e-Science) processes. Much of this success is due to their ability to provide generic functionality for modeling, execution and monitoring processes. These functionalities work well when process execution follows a well-behaved path towards achieving the models objectives. However, exceptions and anomalous situations that fall outside of the well-behaved execution path still pose a significant challenge to PAIS. The treatment for such exceptions usually involves interventions in systems by human operators, which result in significant additional cost for businesses. In this paper, we introduce a cost-aware recovery composition method that is able to find and follow recovery paths that reduce the cost of exception handling. From a practical point of view, our proposal reduces complexity and the need for manual interventions to handle exceptions. Finally, the feasibility of recovery mechanism is discussed from its implementation into WED-flow framework.