Supporting Blended Workflows

Despite advances in the field of workflow flexibility, there is still insufficient support for dealing with unforeseen exceptions. In particular, it is challenging to find a solution which preserves the intent of the process as much as possible when such exceptions are encountered. This challenge can be alleviated by making the connection between a process and its objectives more explicit. This paper presents a demo illustrating the blended workflow approach where two specifications are fused together, a “classic” process model and a goal model. End users are guided by the process model but may deviate from this model whenever unexpected situations are encountered. The two models involved provide views on the process and the demo shows how one can switch between these views and how they are kept consistent by the blended workflow engine. A simple example involving the making of a doctor’s appointment illustrates the potential advantages of the proposed approach to both researchers and developers. 1 The Blended Workflow Approach The blended workflow engine supports a novel approach [1] to workflow management systems that provides end users with two views of the same workflow instance, a “classical” workflow view based on an explicit process model and a view which shows objectives and their relationships. By executing the workflow instance according to the former view, end users’ work is guided by a definition of what is the standard behaviour, specified by explicit organisational rules, whereas the latter view empowers end users to use their tacit domain knowledge to handle unexpected situations. The two views are supported by two different specifications, one activitybased and the other goal-based. Both specifications share a common data model. As a workflow instance progresses toward its completion via consecutive instantiations of its data model, the two specifications describe a prescriptive and a descriptive way of instantiating the data model.