Towards Autonomically-Capable Processes: A Vision and Potentially Supportive Methods

Process-aware information systems have a significant potential to support both systems and humans in various processes by partially or completely automating certain activities. However, greater adoption and inclusion are currently hindered by the cost of ownership and significant investments due to the burdens associated with the design, modeling, implementation, testing, optimization, manual adaptation, variant management, and exception handling for processes, besides the general administrative system management costs. While purely autonomic processes would ideally not require any human interaction, this chapter describes a vision for autonomically capable processes, where processes are practically supported by the system in such a way that they reduce the human interaction burdens by being context-aware and exhibiting certain self-configuration, self-adaptation, self-optimization, self-healing capabilities. Various cross-cutting aspects and issues requiring consideration in order to address these challenging capabilities are discussed, and potentially useful methods and techniques towards achieving the vision are highlighted. Furthermore, an example system targeted at one domain that exhibits these capabilities to some degree is used to illustrate how a combination of various techniques can be synergistically applied to a system to support incremental autonomic capabilities for processes.