Adaptive Workflow: An Approach Based on Inheritance

Today’s information systems do not support adaptive workflow: either the information system abstracts from the workflow processes at hand and focuses on the management of data and the execution of individual tasks via applications or the workflow is supported by the information system but it is hard to handle changes. This paper addresses this problem by classifying the types of changes. Based on this classification, issues such as syntactic/semantic correctness, case transfer, and management information are discussed. It turns out that the trade-off between flexibility and support raises challenging questions. Some of these questions can be answered using advanced inheritance notions. This paper provides four inheritance-preserving transformation rules which can be used to avoid the typical problems related to change.

(postscript / pdf version of the complete paper)

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