Featuring automatic adaptivity through workflow enactment and planning

Process Management Systems (PMSs, a.k.a. Workflow Management Systems - WfMSs) are currently more and more used as a supporting tool to coordinate the enactment of processes. In real world scenarios, the environment may change in unexpected ways so as to prevent a process from being successfully carried out. In order to cope with these anomalous situations, a PMS should automatically adapt the process without completely replacing it. In this paper, we propose a general approach and a conceptual architecture to automatic adaptation, based on the concept of declarative modeling of processes and the use of continuous planning techniques. We show the feasibility of the proposed approach by discussing its deployment on top of YAWL, one of the most famous research prototypes of PMSs, in order to demonstrate the modularity and nice integrability with existing models and techniques. A running example shows the practical applicability of the approach.