Exceptions and Exception Handling in Business Process Management Systems - Analysis and Classification

During the last decade, business process management technologies have become increasingly important. The rapid technical growth causes large dynamic changes to process complexity and increases the amounts of variants. Business process executions are vulnerable to various exceptions. Mostly, the business analysts remain busy optimizing process modeling, rather than focusing on the classification of exceptions in order to optimize the processes. Contemporary exceptions are often given high priority in process modeling and are addressed in early analysis and design phases. Due to the fact that exceptions can be modeled either too rough or too precise, there is often a gap between optimal modeling and modeling all occurring exceptions.
Exceptions in business process management systems have to be specialized and merged into classifications. This details the types of exceptions affecting real world processes. This thesis has the aim to support optimized exception modeling in an early phase of business process development by analyzing the sources of exceptions and proposing classifications for exceptions. For this purpose, various process models, especially medical processes from the Ulm university clinic are critically evaluated.