The coo operator to support and improve the flexibility of adaptive workflows

During the past few years, a lot of work has been done in the process modeling field. Process modeling is one of the major activity in domains like software engineering, design or creation. Research focused on how to express models and how to ensure that a given model is well followed by all the participants. Despite these proposals, there is a few work on how to ensure that a model is suitable for an organization and that the proposed model is really usable. With new technologies getting important and dedicated to the World Wide Web, people realize that some of the models are not fitting with the reality. Cooperation and collaboration aspects are often missing, and the models are not flexible enough to reflect the reality. All these problems are currently an important research field in two domains: software engineering processes and workflow management systems. The need for adaptive and flexible workflows is now well accepted, as the need for a higher level of cooperation. We present in this paper an approach, which uses techniques described by Rabiner (1989), Stolcke and Omohundro (1994), and by Herbst and Karagiannis (see Proceedings of the Ninth IEEE Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, 1998) and original techniques based on the coo operator. We also explain how this work is applied in a real AEC (architectural, engineering, construction) application context and the reason why we choose such a solution. Then, we discuss our current implementation work