Efficient Handling of Changes in Dynamic Workflow Systems

Workflow systems have been used in collaborative environments for many years to assist individuals and organizations to organize project executions and carry out work sequences. Two conflicting goals are argued in the literature regarding workflow systems: the need to provide efficient flexibility in terms of capabilities to handle changing situations and the need for control without creating high overhead. For this reason, current research in workflow systems concentrates primarily on making the workflows flexible to changes in processes. In this paper, we present an approach to handle changes in dynamic workflow systems. First, we introduce efficient change handling algorithms that will incorporate certain modifications that must be made in the current workflow, and based on the results, a new workflow will be generated accordingly. Then we introduce a case study to validate our algorithms. Finally, we simulate and compare the proposed algorithms with existing ones to show the level of improvement that can be achieved.