A Context Model for Business Process Adaptation Based on Ontology Reasoning

The surrounding context information of business processes is unpredictable and dynamically changing over time. Therefore, they should dynamically adapt themselves to different changes in context information such as business rules or computational changes in available resources. For example, we may add a particular delivery service for golden customers, or provide new payment services in case of unavailability of service providers, or change a service invocation based on available bandwidth. Unlike other methods which provide a context Meta model or a shallow context taxonomy in a specific limited scope of the business domain, we focused on ontology engineering methods not only to propose a general multipurpose context ontology but also to present our proposal as an underlying ontology for other researchers to extend and customize it for their applications. In this paper, the business process adaptation knowledge is modelled in the form of concepts, relations, and axioms which comprises time, resources, performers, locations, environment, and rules to model and record whole context information of adaptation mechanism. We characterized our work in comparison with related studies to show its completeness and demonstrated it by using an online learning management system and virtual class case studies