Goal-Compliance Framework for Self-Adaptive Workflows

摘要

Workflow adaptation involves two major research topics: flexibility and correctness. The former is related to the ability to react to change and adapt workflow structure, while the latter is related to managing this flexibility and ensuring syntactical, semantical as well as behavioural consistencies. Current approaches range from providing flexible workflows to flexible and consistent workflows. They mostly focus on syntactical consistency and generic properties (such as deadlock-freedom), but rarely consider semantic aspects. However, not providing semantic guarantees neglects the importance of preserving the original goal. The primary focus of this research is to ensure goal compliance during workflow reconfiguration. Thus, we analyse the impact of workflow automatic adaptation on the goal in question. As a result, we define goal-compliance constraints and develop a goal-compliance framework, which automatically and dynamically adapts workflow instances through Event-Condition-Action policies. Furthermore, it validates the adaptation against the goal-compliance rules and constraints through model checking and ontology-based approach.