Context-sensitive adaptation of workflows

Abstract

In many domains such as health care or catastrophe management workflows are used to coordinate complex activities. Context-awareness plays an important role to dynamically react on new situations in such scenarios. Changes in context often require structural changes of affected workflows. In current approaches of adaptive Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) context-sensitive adaptation at runtime of the workflow mostly has to be done manually. In this paper an approach for the context-sensitive adaptation of workflows as runtime is proposed. We introduce an adaptation layer which automatically calculates and semi-automatically executes the necessary workflow adaptations. It interacts with a context service to subscribe to context changes and an adaptive WfMS to implement the workflow adaptation. With this system support reaction and adaptation times and therewith the costs for workflow adaptation can be significantly decreased compared to the manual approaches. In addition, it is possible to trace which context information caused which adaptation and thus, reuse of adaptation decisions is possible.