Enterprise-Wide and Cross-Enterprise Workflow Management: Challenges and Research Issues for Adaptive Workflows

The paper discusses important challenges and research issues for adaptive workflow management systems (WfMS), especially if they shall be applied to enterprise-wide applications. It shows that an adaptive WfMS must provide support for different kinds of (dynamic) workflow (WF) changes in order to be applicable to a broader spectrum of processes. In this context, both, requirements for WF schema evolution and issues related to ad-hoc changes of individual WF instances are discussed. A particulary interesting aspect, which is described in more detail, is how to combine such dynamic changes with a distributed execution of workflows, taking into account performance issues. For enterprise-wide and cross-enterprise workflows, the distributed execution of workflows may be attractive due to several reasons.