BPM and Exception Handling: Focus on Organizational Resilience

This paper analyzes exception handling in business process management (BPM) with a major focus on resilience, i.e., the capability to maintain operations under a wide spectrum of potential breakdowns. The research highlights the need to support various types of exceptions, including expected, planned, unexpected, and true exceptions. The developed support contemplates the vital human involvement in exception handling. We propose a specialized component supporting exception diagnosis, escalation to several operators, collaboration support, recovery actions, and monitoring the system evolution. The fundamental contribution of this research is the extension of BPM exception-handling capabilities to true exceptions.