Hilmar Acker

Towards Truly Flexible and Adaptive Process-Aware Information Systems

If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. Particularly, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of running process instances on-the-fly (e.g., to dynamically add, delete or move process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration (i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances if desired). These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains.

Separating per-client and pan-client views in service specification

Service-oriented architecture is predicated on the availability of accurate and universally-understandable specifications of services which capture all the information that a potential user needs to know to use the service. However, WSDL, the most widely used service specification standard, only allows the syntactic signatures of the operations offered by a service to be described. This not only makes it difficult to specify context sensitive information, such as acceptable operation invocation sequences and drive service discovery through client-oriented requirements, it is also an inappropriate level of abstraction for a human friendly description of a services capabilities. The current thinking is that context sensitive information such as operation sequencing rules should be described in an accompanying specification document written in an auxiliary language. For example, WS-CDL is a well known auxiliary language for writing choreography descriptions that capture interaction scenarios in terms of abstract roles and participants. However, this approach not only decouples the additional information from the core WSDL specification, it also describes it in terms of abstractions which may not match those used (implicitly or explicitly) by the service. In this paper we investigate this issue in greater depth, explore the different solution patterns and propose a new specification approach which rectifies the identified problems.

Security Challenges in Adaptive e-Health Processes

E-health scenarios demand system-based support of process-oriented information systems. As most of the processes in this domain have to be flexibly adapted to meet exceptional or unforeseen situations, flexible process-oriented information systems (POIS) are needed which support ad-hoc deviations at the process instance level. However, e-health scenarios are also very sensitive with regard to privacy issues. Therefore, an adequate access rights management is essential as well. The paper addresses challenges which occur when flexible POIS and adequate rights management have to be put together.