Modeling Alternatives in Exception Executions

To date, the ability of a business process designer to produce a solid, well-validated workflow models is limited, especially since all necessary scenarios that need to be covered by the workflow are hard to predict. Workflow management systems (WfMSs), serving as the main vehicle of business process execution, should recognize those limits, and increase its support to designers in this task. One aspect of such assistance is in exception handlers generation. In this paper we propose a model language enrichment for expressing workflow semantics, in the context of alternative solutions, within the process model. Thus, enabling the designer to state which possible alternatives and their applicability to changing execution paths states. Using this enrichment, an inference algorithm can efficiently find an adequate alternative. The model language is used as a basis for a design tool and an execution environment, which semi-automatically generates exception handlers, resulting, due to a reduced search space, in a smaller set of exceptions for the designer/user to choose from.