Reducing Escalation-Related Costs in WFMSs

Escalations refer to the actions taken when workkow activities, which constitute business processes, miss their deadlines. Typically, escalations increase the cost of business processes due to the execution of additional activities, the compensation of nished activities, or the intervention of highly-paid workers. In this paper, we present ongoing research addressing workkow escalations and the cost associated with them. Our goal is twofold: (a) minimize the number of escalations during process execution and (b) reduce the cost associated with escalations when they cannot be avoided. To reduce the number of executions that result in escalations, we propose to keep track of the slack time accumulated during process executions and use it to adjust the deadlines (i.e., delay escalations) of the remaining activities. To reduce the cost of inevitable escalations, we describe an approach for predicting whether a process is going to escalate at some future point and, then, deciding whether and when to force escalation at an early stage of the process execution. Escalating early is often cost-eeective because it allows more time for remedial actions and reduces the work and resources wasted for nished activities that would have to be compensated. Preliminary experimental results show the eeectiveness of our techniques.