A Framework for Semantic Recovery Strategies in Case of Process Activity Failures

During automated process execution semantic activity failures may frequently occur, e.g., when a vehicle transporting a container has a breakdown. So far there are no applicable solutions to overcome such exceptional situations. Often the only possibility is to cancel and roll back respective process instances what is not always possible and more often not desired. In this paper we contribute towards the system–assisted support of finding forward recovery solutions. Our framework is based on the facility to (automatically) perform dynamic changes of single process instances in order to deal with the exceptional situation. We identify and formalize factors which influence the kind of applicable recovery solutions. Then we show how to derive possible recovery solutions and how to evaluate their quality with respect to different constraints. All statements are illustrated by well–studied cases from different domains.