ADOME-WFMS: Towards Cooperative Handling of Workflow Exceptions

In services-oriented agile supply chain management, more and more complex business process require for automatic and flexible ability to react to the dynamic market environ- ment. In this paper, we proposed the distributed and adaptive workflow model and implementation. The workflow model focus on the BPEL4WS based workflow composition, the DAIM-S based business domain ontology, XSRL based business process monitoring and workflow performance, semantic ECA based workflow exception handling, and petri net based workflow analyzing. In the final, we proposed intelligence multi-agents based distributed and adaptive workflow model implementation. I. INTRODUCTION Business organizations confront an increased global com- petition, which forces companies to improve their efficiency and flexibility for adapting the dynamic business environment. The agility of a company's response to customer demand has been recognized as a critical success factor to meet the global competition. Agile supply chain management has become an effective and significant measure to enhance competitive advantage of modern enterprises (1)(2). To satisfy and respond quickly to the business requirements, we proposed loosing coupled services-oriented agile supply chain management ar- chitecture. At the same time, more and more complex business process require for automatic and flexible ability to react to dynamic market and strengthen their ability to compete in global business society. To meet such requirement, we pro- posed a distributed and adaptive workflow model in services- oriented agile supply chain management. In this model, we apply BPEL4WS as services workflow definition language to composite the complex business process, and discussed the DAIM-S based business domain ontology, XSRL based business process monitoring and workflow performance, se- mantic ECA based workflow exception handling, and Petri net based workflow analyzing. In the final, We also proposed the coordinated intelligent agents based distributed and adaptive workflow implementations in services-oriented agile supply chain management.

This paper proposes a novel architectural framework handling effective unexpected exceptions in workflow management systems (WfMS). Effective unexpected exceptions are events for which the organizations lack handling strategies. Unstructured human interventions are necessary to overcome these situations, but clash with the type of model control currently exercised by WfMS. The proposed framework uses the notion of map guidance to orchestrate these human interventions. Map guidance empowers users with contextual information about the WfMS and environment, enables the interruption of model control on the affected instances, supports collaborative exception handling and facilitates regaining model control after the exception has been resolved. The framework implementation in the Open Symphony open source platform is also described.

Along with rapid development of workflow technology, on the market, there are a lot of workflow products. Workflow exception handling study in the exception of workflow, through the appropriate method to deal effectively with the exception to ensure the implementation of the workflow. Most existing research on workflow management systems (WFMS) has been focused on workflow based on well structured and well-behaved business processes. But it is devoid of the advisement of flexibility and uncertainty. This paper proposes an Agents group based approach for exception handling. Agents group is dispatched to find out the status of running processes in the system to keep track and troubleshoot them when necessary. This model describes the classification of workflow exception, and the corresponding design of different type of exception handing agents and their cooperation.

In order to realize the exception handling of workflow in UML activity diagram and avoid interruption which influences the running of workflow,this extended paper UML activity diagram firstly and adds the concepts about structural unit and functional unit.They ensure the consistency of workflow execution semantics.Meanwhile,they restrict recovery range and set recovery point automatically.Then a new method called T-workflow recovery strategy was proposed,which could base the principle of recovering the same layer and spreading and set recovery size to unit level.The results of experiment show that this method is feasible.It does not only reduce the execution of compensation task of every activity node by setting up the compensation tasks for different units,but also avoid maintaining to the executive history.

A rule-based approach to proactive exception handling in business processes

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) are being increasingly deployed to deliver e-business transactions across organizational boundaries. To ensure a high service quality in such transactions, exception-handling schemes for conflict resolution are needed. The conflicts primarily arise due to failure of a task in workflow execution because of underlying application, or controlling WfMS component failures or insufficient user input. So far, little progress has been reported in addressing conflict resolution in cross-organizational business processes, though its importance has been recognized. In this paper, we identify the exception handling techniques that support conflict resolution in cross-organizational settings. In particular, we propose a novel, “bundled” exception-handling approach, which supports (1) exception knowledge sharing--sharing exception specifications and handling experiences, (2) coordinated exception handling, and (3) intelligent problem solving--using case based reasoning to reuse exception handing experiences. A prototype of this exception handling mechanism is developed and integrated as a part of the METEOR Workflow Management System. An evaluation of our approach is also presented through some sample workflow applications.

A workflow involves the coordinated execution of multiple operations and can be used to capture business processes. Typical workflow management systems are centralised and rigid; they cannot cope with the unexpected flexibly. Multi-agent systems offer the possibility of enacting workflows in a distributed manner, by agents which are intelligent and autonomous. This should bring flexibility and robustness to the process. When unexpected exceptions occur during the enactment of a workflow we would like agents to be able to cope with them intelligently. Agents should be able to autonomously find some alternative sequence of steps which can achieve the tasks of the original workflow as well as possible. This requires that agents have some understanding of the operations of the workflow and possible alternatives. To facilitate this we propose to represent knowledge about agents' capabilities and relationships in an ontology, and to endow agents with the ability to reason about this semantic knowledge. Alternative ways of achieving workflow tasks may well require an adjustment of the original agent organisation. To this end we propose a flexible agent organisation where agents' roles, powers and normative relationships can be changed during workflow enactment if necessary. We use an example to illustrate how this combination allows certain workflow exceptions to be handled.

Practical exception handling and resolution in concurrent programs

Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used for organizational business process re-engineering and automation in various application domains. The use of ubiquitous web as infrastructure of WfMSs widens the applicability of workflow technology to almost every organization. Workflow technology is becoming the core technology for enterprise computing. However, many limitations remain in existing workflow management systems for supporting more demanding applications. In this paper, we address several issues in current workflows management: workflow modeling and verification, transactional support of workflows, and workflow evolution. We also discuss the use of web technology as an infrastructure for supporting WfMSs.

In a contract, exceptional clauses specify sanctions that come in force when the primary obligations are not fulfilled. An important aspect of exception handling is their resolution: determining which particular exception clause should be enforced when a violation is detected. This paper presents a specification and resolution technique for electronic contracts that can be used by a third party exception resolution service.

In this paper, defeasible workflow is proposed as a framework to support exception handling for workflow management. By using the “justified” ECA rules to capture more contexts in workflow modeling, defeasible workflow uses context dependent reasoning to enhance the exception handling capability of workflow management systems. In particular, this limits possible alternative exception handler candidates in dealing with exceptional situations. Furthermore, a case-based reasoning (CBR) mechanism with integrated human involvement is used to improve the exception handling capabilities. This involves collecting cases to capture experiences in handling exceptions, retrieving similar prior exception handling cases, and reusing the exception handling experiences captured in those cases in new situations.

In ever-changing business environments, organizations continuously refine their processes to benefit from and meet the constraints of new technology, new business rules, and new market requirements. Workflow management systems (WFMSs) support organizations in evolving their processes by providing them with technological mechanisms to design, enact, and monitor workflows. However, workflows repositories often grow and start to encompass a variety of interdependent workflows. Without appropriate tool support, keeping track of such interdependencies and staying aware of the impact of a change in a workflow schema becomes hard. Workflow designers are often blindsided by changes that end up inducing side- and ripple-effects. This poses threats to the reliability of the workflows and ultimately hampers the evolvability of the workflow repository as a whole. In this paper, the authors introduce a change impact analysis approach based on metrics and visualizations to support the evolution of workflow repositories. They implemented the approach and later integrated it as a module in the HP Operations Orchestration (HP OO) WFMS. The authors conducted an exploratory study in which they thoroughly analyzed the workflow repositories of 8 HP OO customers. They characterized the customer repositories from a change impact perspective and compared them against each other. The authors were able to spot the workflows with high change impact among thousands of workflows in each repository. They also found that while the out-of-the-box repository included in HP OO had 10 workflows with high change impact, customer repositories included 11 (+10%) to 35 (+250%) workflows with this same characteristic. This result indicates the extent to which customers should put additional effort in evolving their repositories. The authors' approach contributes to the body of knowledge on static workflow evolution and complements existing dynamic workflow evolution approaches. Their techniques also aim to help organizations build more flexible and reliable workflow repositories.

Cross-company business processes are common in today’s networked economy and are nowadays often supported by process support systems that integrate the information systems of the different partners based on web service technology. In contrast to earlier Workflow Management Systems, which were often deployed in the controlled environment of a single company, the distributed nature of modern solutions make company-spanning web service processes more susceptible to failures. Therefore, it is desirable to augment the process models already at design time with error-handling behavior such that disrupted process instances can for instance be rolled back or completed on an alternative execution path, if, e.g., an individual service is not reachable.In this chapter, we will give an overview of past and current approaches as well as potential future works to exception handling in web service processes. We start with the concepts that were developed in the area of Workflow Management Systems, continue with error-handling techniques in state-of-the-art process modeling languages and finally give an outlook on future automated approaches to error recovery and repair.KeywordsException HandlingBusiness Process Modeling NotationRepair PlanBPEL ProcessFault HandlerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Information System is one of the key domain in which lot of research has been done in the past few years. Applying Information systems to heterogeneous and distributed environments is one of the current research areas. Business Process Management Systems is the information systems which deal with the administration of tasks in the business processes, organizational structures, or in the related context. The Workflow Management system, the early idea of BPM, controls the workflow in an organization, data transfer, and integration of legacy information systems with existing programs and program modules, delegation of business tasks. Offering task management services especially modeling of business processes and underlying organizations, BPM serves it meaning and incorporates the WFM system. BPM supporting the use of knowledge concerning the awareness/unawareness of integrated software, and analysis of processes and organizational structure in terms of verification, modification, evaluation are key management in BPM system I.INTRODUCTION TO BPM: Combination of corporate restructuring and mergers urged the department and processes to be automated and linked together. Unfortunately it created largely disconnected spaghetti of systems and applications. Business Process Management (BPM) was born from a strong need to streamline internal processes and connections between both internal and external functions. It provides ability to model, monitor, manage and manipulate processes quickly in response to changes in strategy and market forces. BPM is an extension of classical Work Flow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. BPM delivers the maximum utility of legacy system. It is a method for revolutionizing the way the work moves throughout an organization. II.COMPONENTS OF BPM: The four key elements in Business Process Management are: Process modeling, Process rule, Process management, and Process performance analytics. Process modeling: Process modeling describes the flow of information (business process).It helps in building a model of process and mapping into an implementation frame work. Modeling requires a consistent analysis and representation of the processes. It forms the basis for the userspecific process environment. Process Rule: Process Rule is a heart of the BPM. It involves execution of discrete steps & integration of information. A process rules engine is used for this purpose. The engine is to monitor and manage the given steps by providing a flow control over the business process. If a process fails or delayed, a compensated action can be done to rectify. Process Management: Process Management is to correlate business/application events to fundamental business metrics .It enables the organization to monitor and optimize the business process. Once the process has been analyzed, modeled and the associated rules are formed. The next stage involves the visualization and management. Visualization means transaction data ranging from holistic to process-state or client state specific rules. Process Performance Analytics: Process Performance Analytics is a transition data source available for sophisticated management analytics .This data should be available on a retrospective or real-time basis. It should answer to one of the most difficult question like “how much does it cost to process a specific transaction?” By this way BPM mainly addresses four components. They are Work Flow Management, Content and records management Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Activity monitoring (BAM). III.RELEVENCE TO SYSTEM INTEGRATION: BPM can be fitted easily on the top of existing IT system. It is the Process rules that governs all the happenings and optimizes the process. BPM will not be able to work without the connectivity provided by the EAI layer. EAI layer provides BPM to gain and measure the value from the investment. On the other hand, BPM provides value to the EAI technology layer of Information technology. BPM layer offers business management the view of the message processing layer. It is used to unlock the value of the information held in the integration layer. It is also used to gather data of every transaction in the lifecycle. IV.APPLICATION OF BPM: BPM can be applied to any application which needs these advantages. BPM reduces unnecessary high losses in time critical transactions, helps to provide any critical information, practical application yield fast ROI ,better control over the information, identifying and maximizing the benefits faster, better analysis and tracking, provides enterprise-wide visibility of business processes, improve the effectiveness of the core operations, provides ability to coordinate interactions between information systems, business process and the people, flexible and easily changed by non-technical business people.