Flexible Business Process Management Using Forward Stepping and Alternative Paths

The abilty to continuously revise business practices is essential to organizations aiming at reducing their costs and increasing their revenues. Rapid and continuous changes to business processes result in less control over the executed activities. As a result, the ability of process designers to produce solid, well-validated work‡ow models is limited. Work‡ow management systems (WfMSs), serving as the main vehicle of business process execution, should recognize these risks and become more dynamic to allow the required business ‡exibility. In this paper, we propose a dynamic mechanism that allows backtracking and forward stepping at an instance level. This mechanism analyzes the feasibility of applying certain modi…cations to running instances and provides an e¢ cient algorithm that avoids redundant operation activation. We believe that this mechanism can bolster the ability of a business process management system to deal with unexpected situations and to resolve, in runtime, scenarios in which such resolution both is called for and does not violate any business process constraints. Throughout this paper, we use the paradigm of Web services to demonstrate the capabilities of the