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Most of existing workflow management solutions (e.g., IBM Domino, iPlanet, Fujisu iFlow, TeamCenter) are designed to handle static business processes, in various degrees. The solution currently adopted by most WMS is in fact that, once process changes occur, new workflow templates are defined and workflow instances are initiated accordingly from scratch. This over-simplified approach forces tasks that were completed on the old instance to be executed again, also when not necessary.
Dynamic workflow change management might be brought in as a potential solution. The design of dynamic workflows needs adequate modeling/specification formalisms and tools to soundly handle possible changes occurring during workflow operation. A common approach is to pollute workflow design with details that do not regard the current workflow behavior, but rather its evolution. That hampers analysis, reuse and maintenance in general.
We propose and discuss the adoption of a recent Petri Net based reflective model (based on classical PN) as a support to dynamic workflow design, by addressing a localized open problem: how to determine which tasks should be redone, and which ones should not, when transferring a workflow instance from an old to a new template.
The idea behind is that keeping functional aspects separated from evolutionary ones, and applying evolution to the (current) workflow template only when necessary, results in a simple reference model on which the ability of formally verifying typical workflow properties is preserved, thus favoring a dependable workflow adaptability.
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