Abstract
At process-aware information systems, it is sometimes necessary to deviate from the modelled business process. For instance, in exceptional cases or to correct mistakes, users shall be able to jump dynamically forward and backward in the process. Until now, this topic was hardly respected in scientific literature and it is insufficiently realized in commercial process engines. In this paper, very comprehensive requirements and the expected behavior of a process engine are presented for such dynamic jumps during run-time of a business process. The approach does not only respect forward and backward jumps within sequences of activities but also jumps into and out of parallel branches, conditional branches, and within loops. In addition, configuration options allow to define the desired behavior: For instance, activities bypassed by a forward jump may be caught up later on. As well, it is configurable whether activities that were already executed earlier, shall be repeated after a backward jump or whether their results (output data) shall be reused. Furthermore, it is discussed when and by whom such configuration options may be defined.
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Notes
- 1.
In reality, this process is more complex and not only Act. D is composed of several single activities. For details see [3].
- 2.
A literature search was performed with the following words, each in combination with “jump”: “business process”, “workflow”, and “process engine”. Furthermore, a search was performed for “forward jump” and “backward jump” in combination with the word “process”.
- 3.
In order to increase readability, in the following, only the male form will be used.
- 4.
For all other types of costs, the amount that arose in fact, is paid to the employee. The ratings (Act. C, D, F) are only used to calculate the expected costs as basis for the decision in Act. G.
- 5.
The RepeatMode may be relevant for Act. G, as well, if (intermediate) results were already saved before the jump. The dotted lines in Fig. 4b mark activities where the configuration options are relevant at other possible jumps concerning this source and target regions; e.g. RepeatMode is relevant for Act. H at a jump that starts at this (source) Act. H.
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Bauer, T. (2022). Requirements for Dynamic Jumps at the Execution of Business Processes. In: Shishkov, B. (eds) Business Modeling and Software Design. BMSD 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 453. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11510-3_3
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