Abstract
A basic step towards flexibility in workflow systems is the consistent and effective management of workflow evolution, i.e. of changing existing workflows while they are operational. One of the most challenging issue is the handling of running instances when their schemata are modified: simple solutions can be devised, but they often imply loosing all the work done or failing in capturing the advantages offered by workflow modifications; this is unacceptable for many applications.
In this paper we address the problem of workflow evolution, from both a static and a dynamic point of view. We define a complete, minimal, and consistent set of modification primitives that allow modifications of workflow schemata and we introduce a taxonomy of policies to manage evolution of running instances when the corresponding workflow schema is modified. Formal criteria are introduced, based on a simple workflow conceptual model, in order to determine which running instances can be transparently migrated to the new version. A case study, relating the assembling of a desktop computer, will exemplify the introduced concepts.
Research presented in this paper is sponsored by the WIDE Esprit Project N. 20280
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Banerjee J.,Kim W., Kim H., Korth H., Semantics and Implementation in Object-Oriented databases, Proc. of ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data, San Francisco, CA, May 1987.
Bandinelli S., Fuggetta A., Ghezzi C., Software Process Model Evolution in the SPADE Environment, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, December 1993.
Bertino E., Martino L.D., Object-Oriented Database Systems — Concepts and Architectures. Addison-Wesley International, 1993.
Casati F., Ceri S., Pernici B., Pozzi G.,“Conceptual Modeling of Workflows”, Proc. of the Object-Oriented and Entity-Relationship Conf., Gold Coast, Australia, 1995.
Cohen B., Human Aspects in Office Automation, Elsevier, 1984.
Croft W.B., Lefkowitz L.S., Task Support in an Office System, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, July 1984.
Ellis S., Keddara K. and Rozenberg G.,“Dynamic Change within Workflow Systems”, ACM Conf. on Organizational Computing Systems (COOCS 95), 1995.
Hsu M., Kleissner C., ObjectFlow: Towards a Process Management Infrastructure, Distributed and Parallel Databases, 4, 1996.
Kappel G., Lang P., Rausch-Schott S., Retschitzegger W., Workflow Management Based on Object, Rules and Roles, IEEE Data Engineering, March 1995.
Proper H., Van der Weide T.P., A General Theory for Evolving Application Models, in IEEE TKDE, Dec. 1995.
Rusinkiewicz M., Sheth A., Specification and Execution of Transaction Workflows, in Modern Database Systems: the Object Model, Interoperability, and beyond, Kim W. (ed.), Addison-Wesley, 1994.
Zicari, R., A Framework for O2 Schema Updates, Proceedings of the 7th Intl. Conference on Data Engineering, Kobe, Japan, April 1991.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Casati, F., Ceri, S., Pernici, B., Pozzi, G. (1996). Workflow evolution. In: Thalheim, B. (eds) Conceptual Modeling — ER '96. ER 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1157. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0019939
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0019939
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-61784-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70685-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive