Rule-based Dynamic Business Process Modification and Adaptation

The advances in ubiquitous computing technologies have given rise to the u-Business, where we obtain business-related context information from ubiquitous devices to adapt to the changes of business environments in a timely manner. In these rapidly changing u-Business environments, we need a mechanism to modify business process schemas, which represent a group of business activities arranged in a meaningful way to give values to the u-Business. We also need a way to migrate running process instances to their new business process schemas. In this paper, we propose a rule-driven approach for dynamic business process schema modification and instance adaptation. The proposed approach uses rules to describe schema modification operations to be applied and rule execution conditions. Business environment changes are encoded in these rules, thus timely schema modification is possible. We also propose a system architecture for realizing this rule-driven approach. We have designed the system architecture by utilizing existing technologies so that the system can be easily implemented.