Formal foundation and conceptual design of dynamic adaptations in a workflow management system

Abstract

While the different aspects of flexible workflow management are still under discussion, the ability to adapt the structure of running workflow instances to modified workflow schemas is an important property of a flexible workflow management system. In this paper, we present the formal foundation and conceptual design of dynamic adaptations in an object-oriented workflow management system. We describe in some detail how workflow schemas are represented. The system architecture, based on the CORBA object-oriented middleware, is overviewed, and the implementation of dynamic adaptations is sketched. An example introduces the graphical user interface of the system and shows a dynamic adaptation.