Extended Workflow Flexibility using Rule-Based Adaptation Patterns with Eventing Semantics

In several industry scenarios, it is often the case that an existing reference workflow has to be adapted according to specific context factors, which might even change at runtime. The adapted workflow instances virtually constitute process variants. In order to keep the efforts for systematic variant configuration and maintenance on a manageable level, recent work has proposed the use of context-dependent adaptation rules. The involved rule-based change operations are however usually restricted to simple constructs like task deletion or insertion. This can be an obstacle if eventing paradigms for modeling reactive parts of a workflow also should be combined with context-awareness. In this paper, we present an example machinery maintenance service delivery usecase and show how hierarchical context rules can be integrated to tailor the workflow to changing data contexts. We furthermore propose to extend existing basic change operations with an adaptation pattern catalogue that especially captures event-based adaptation semantics for workflow languages like BPMN2 and show how a part of our solution was prototypically implemented in jBoss Drools.