Autonomic Workflow and Business Process Modelling for Networked Enterprises

As markets become more and more competitive and dynamic, companies need to increase control over their business processes to quickly adapt them to the changing conditions of the operational environment. Workflow management technology is a means to automate and control business processes, but they need more sophisticated capabilities to cope with highly dynamic execution contexts. This chapter proposes a novel approach to adaptive workflow management, based on a programming model and a related runtime system. By combining imperative and declarative programming, a specific workflow management system is able to react to events sourced from the business environment by modifying the structure and behaviour of running workflows. The chapter discusses related work on workflow adaptation, illustrates the proposed autonomic workflow model, the overall architecture of the related management system, the technical motivations and choices for the implementation, and the impact of this kind of workflows onto business modelling