Enabling Adaptive Process-Aware Information Systems with ADEPT2

Introduction

In today’s dynamic business world the economic success of an enterprise increasingly depends on its ability to quickly and flexibly react to changes in its environment. Generally, the reasons for such changes can be manifold. As examples consider the introduction of new regulations, the availability of new medical tests, or changes in customers’ attitudes. Companies and organizations therefore have recognized business agility as prerequisite for being able to cope with changes and to deal with emerging trends like business-on-demand, high product and service variability, and faster time-to-market (Weber, Rinderle, & Reichert, 2007).

Process-aware information systems (PAISs) offer promising perspectives in this respect, and a growing interest in aligning information systems in a process-oriented way can be observed (Weske, 2007). As opposed to data- or function-centered information systems, PAISs separate process logic and application code. Most PAISs describe process logic explicitly in terms of a process template providing the schema for handling respective business cases. Usually, the core of the process layer is built by a process management system which provides generic functions for modeling, configuring, executing, and monitoring business processes. This separation of concerns increases maintainability and reduces cost of change (Mutschler, Weber, & Reichert, 2008a). Changes to one layer often can be performed without affecting other layers; e.g., changing the execution order of process activities or adding new activities to a process template can, to a large degree, be accomplished without touching the application services linked to the different process activities (Dadam, Reichert, & Kuhn, 2000). Usually, the process logic is expressed in terms of executable process models, which can be checked for the absence of errors already at buildtime (e.g., to exclude deadlocks or incomplete data flow specifications). Examples for PAIS-enabling technologies include workflow management systems (van der Aalst & van Hee, 2002) and case handling tools (van der Aalst, Weske, & Grünbauer, 2005; Weske, 2007).

The ability to effectively deal with process change has been identified as one of the most fundamental success factors for PAISs (Reichert & Dadam, 1997; Müller, Greiner, & Rahm, 2004; Pesic, Schonenberg, Sidorova, & van der Aalst, 2007). In domains like healthcare (Lenz & Reichert, 2007; Dadam et al., 2000) or automotive engineering (Mutschler, Bumiller, & Reichert, 2006; Müller, Herbst, Hammori, & Reichert, 2006), for example, any PAIS would not be accepted by users if rigidity came with it. Through the described separation of concerns PAISs facilitate changes. However, enterprises running PAISs are still reluctant to adapt process implementations once they are running properly (Reijers & van der Aalst, 2005; Mutschler, Reichert, & Bumiller, 2008b). High complexity and high cost of change are mentioned as major reasons for not fully leveraging the potential of PAISs. To overcome this unsatisfactory situation more flexible PAISs are needed enabling companies to capture real-world processes adequately without leading to mismatches between computerized business processes and those running in reality (Lenz & Reichert, 2007; Reichert, Hensinger, & Dadam, 1998b). Instead, users must be able to deviate from the predefined processes if required and to evolve PAIS implementations over time. Such changes must be possible at a high level of abstraction and without affecting consistency and robustness of the PAIS.