Deployment of Adaptive Workflows in Intelligent Environments

Workflows have been used to model repeatable tasks or operations in a number of different industries including manufacturing and software. In this paper we examine the use of workflows to model the interaction of services that can be found in intelligent environments to support user tasks and goals. The deployment of such workflows needs to take care special design considerations, including context awareness, adaptation management, device heterogeneity, and user empowerment. In this paper, we present a framework for the deployment of adaptive workflows. The deployment infrastructure supports BPEL-like, design-time compositions that are complemented by mechanisms for the selection and binding of services at runtime. Workflow behaviour can also adjust dynamically in response to detected changes and unforeseen events by a suit of agents whose initial relationships are specified in the workflows.