Reasoning on Business Processes to Support Change Reuse

This paper addresses a novel reasoning approach for the creation and adaptation of business processes. Today, business processes and the underlying workflows and information systems have to be adaptable to changes as customers expect organizations to deal with their requests in a flexible, individual way. Adaptive workflow technology is a technical solution to facilitate such flexibility. However, it requires the creation and adaptation of workflows, which are both difficult modeling tasks. The paper presents on a case based assistant system that supports the users in creating and adapting workflows by automated change reuse. Novel concepts are introduced for the representation, retrieval and reuse of adaptation cases that record change episodes of workflows. The work has been motivated and is evaluated by a set of real workflows from a sample domain. The paper provides a research contribution to more flexibility of business processes in modern enterprise computing.