Dealing with workflow change : identification of issues and solutions

Adaptability has become one of the major research topics in the area of workflow management. Today’s workflow management systems have problems dealing with both momentary changes and evolutionary changes. As a result, the workflow management system is not used to support dynamically changing workflow processes or the workflow process is supported in a rigid manner, i.e. changes are not allowed or handled outside of the workflow management system. In this paper we focus on the potential problems caused by changes. To structure these problems we use a partitioning based on five perspectives. Errors resulting from change limited to one of these perspectives and multiple-perspective errors are distinguished. To clearly identify the potential problems caused by change, we distinguish between transient and incessant errors, and syntactic and semantic errors. Based on a classification of change and potential errors we point out stepping stones for solving some of the problems.