Supporting Adaptive Workflows in Advanced Application Environments

The need for supporting adaptive workflows (WFs) is widely recognized. For many business processes (BPs) it is nearly impossible to consider all possible task sequences already at the design level. Besides this, ongoing business cases may also have to be adapted to organizational and functional changes in their environment. A basic step towards adaptive workflow management systems (WfMSs) is the support of run-time WF specification as well as of dynamic WF changes. Such changes may affect only a single active WF instance or may affect multiple instances of a particular WF type. To adequately support adaptive WFs, it is important to understand why processes change and which kinds of changes may occur. In this paper we use clinical application scenarios to explain and to elaborate the functionality needed to support dynamic WF changes in an advanced application environment. The paper addresses conceptual issues related to ad hoc changes of a single WF instance on the one hand, and it discusses issues related to WF schema changes and their propagation to its active instances on the other hand. We show that the different levels of changes must be considered in conjunction and we use the ADEPT concepts to illustrate how an integrated approach could look like.