Adaptive Workflow: On the Interplay between Flexibility and Support
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. Only some of these questions
are answered in this paper; most of them require further research.
Since the success of the next generation of workflow management
systems depends on the ability to support adaptive workflow, it is
important to provide answers for the questions raised in this paper
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