Making YAWL and SmartPM Interoperate: Managing Highly Dynamic Processes by Exploiting Automatic Adaptation Features

In the last years, the trade-off between flexibility and support has become a leading issue in workflow technology. In this paper we show how an imperative modeling approach used to define stable and well-understood processes can be complemented by a modeling approach that enables automatic process adaptation and exploits planning techniques to deal with environmental changes and exceptions that may occur during process execution. To this end, we designed and implemented a Custom Service that allows the Yawl execution environment to delegate the execution of subprocesses and activities to the SmartPM execution environment, which is able to automatically adapt a process to deal with emerging changes and exceptions. We demonstrate the feasibility and validity of the approach by showing the design and execution of an emergency management process defined for train derailments.