An Artifact-Centric Approach to Dynamic Modification of Workflow Execution

摘要

Being able to quickly respond to change is critical to any organizations to stay competitive in the marketplace. It is widely acknowledged that it is a necessity to provide flexibility in the process model to handle changes at both model level as well as instance level. Motivated by a business policy rich and highly dynamic business process in the real estate administration in China, we develop a dynamically modifiable workflow model. The model is based on the artifact-centric design principle as opposed to the traditional process-centric approach. Runtime execution variations can be specified as execution modification rules, which lead to deviations to the normal executions. With the support of rules and declarative constructs such as retract, skip, add, and replace, ad-hoc changes can be applied to execution at anytime depending on the runtime data and the instance status gathered through the use of artifacts in our model.