Flexible support and management of adaptive workflow processes

Abstract

Workflow management and support has always been a constant challenge for workflow administrators in industry. This is characterized by the need to balance two conflicting goals - the need for control, and the need to provide sufficient flexibility for workflows to adapt to constantly changing business conditions. The traditional centralized and rigid model of workflow no longer suffices provide this balance. What is needed is an approach that provides sufficient flexibility while simultaneously providing an assurance of control for workflow administrators. In this paper, we present such an approach. Our approach is based on two bodies of research work. The first one is the OpenWater approach, wherein workflows meant to be "discovered" on the fly as workflow participants themselves define and execute the workflows. The second one is our earlier work on adaptive workflow, where we have developed a 3-tier architecture that supports adaptive workflow. In our paper, we enhance our 3-tier architecture with some of the OpenWater ideas, in order to develop what we have called a "flexible workflow support and management" architecture. We also demonstrate it on a real-life example in insurance claims processing.