Markus Lauer

On Representing Instance Changes in Adaptive Process Management Systems

By separating the process logic from the application code process management systems (PMS) offer promising perspectives for automation and management of business processes. However, the added value of PMS strongly depends on their ability to support business process changes which can affect the process type as well as the process instance level. This does not only impose challenging conceptual issues (e.g., correctness of process schemata after changes) but also requires sophisticated implementation concepts with respect to efficient algorithms, flexible architectures, and reasonable treatment of resources. In this paper we sketch the general implementation concepts for representing process type and process instance data as well as for realizating process schema evolution. All these concepts have been developed and are currently implemented in the ADEPT2 prototype within the AristaFlow project

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.

Architectural Design of Flexible Process Management Technology

To provide effective support, process-aware information systems (PAIS) must not freeze existing business processes. Instead they should enable authorized users to deviate on-the-fly from the implemented processes and to dynamically evolve them over time. While there has been a lot of work on the theoretical foundations of dynamic process changes, there is still a lack of PAIS implementing this dynamics. Designing the architecture of respective technology constitutes a big challenge due to the high complexity coming with dynamic processes. Besides this, performance, robustness, security and usability of the system must not be affected by the added flexibility. In the AristaFlow project we have taken a holistic approach to master this complexity. Based on a conceptual framework for flexible process enactment and dynamic processes, we have designed a sophisticated architecture for next generation process management technology. This paper discusses major design goals and basic architectural principles, gives insights into selected system components, and shows how change support features can be realized in an integrated and effective manner.

Improving exception handling by discovering change dependencies in adaptive process management systems

Process-aware information systems should enable the flexible alignment of business processes to new requirements by supporting deviations from the predefined process model at runtime. To facilitate such dynamic process changes we have adopted techniques from case-based reasoning (CBR). In particular, our existing approach allows to capture the semantics of ad-hoc changes, to support their memorization, and to enable their reuse in upcoming exceptional situations. To further improve change reuse this paper presents an approach for discovering dependencies between ad-hoc modifications from change history. Based on this information better user assistance can be provided when dynamic process changes have to be made.

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.

The Ulm Sparrows 2001

The Ulm Sparrows team is a student-oriented, interdisciplinary research effort at the University of Ulm. The team is active in both the simulation and the middle-size league, but simulation efforts are targeted towards supporting the middle-size league robot team. We competed in the RoboCup World Championships in Paris (1998) [5] and Stockholm (1999, quarterfinals) [7], the European RoboCup Championships in Amsterdam (2000, semifinals) [4], plus a number of national events in Germany. For time and budget constraints, we could not participate in Melbourne in 2000.