How to handle dynamic change and capture management information? An approach based on generic workflow models

Today's workflow management systems have problems dealing with both ad-hoc changes and evolutionary changes. As a result, the workflow management system is not used to support dynamically changing workflow processes or the workflow process is supported in a rigid manner, i.e., changes are not allowed or handled outside of the workflow management system. This paper addresses two notorious problems related to adaptive workflow: (1) providing management information at the right aggregation level, and (2) supporting dynamic change, i.e. migrating cases from an old to a new workflow. These two problems are tackled by using generic process models. A generic process model describes a family of variants of the same workflow process. To relate members of a family of workflow processes we propose notions of inheritance. These notions of inheritance are used to address the two problems mentioned both a design-time and at run-time.