An Ontological Approach to the Hierarchical Adaptation of Workflows

Administrative workflows are very useful in large enterprises and public institutions but, in order to use them adequately in their different areas and departments, they must be adapted to the particular conditions of each one, complying with the general regulations of the process established at the top level. This problem, called Hierarchical Adaptation Problem, also implies establishing the proper measures to accomplish when the general regulation is changed. Such measures must maintain the consistency among the different levels by means of the propagation of the changes to all the adaptations. To solve this problem, this work presents the Hierarchical Adaptation Method. A method based on ontologies that defines the rules that must satisfy a generic workflow, specified in ontologies, to be considered adaptable to different application cases. It also establishes the rules that must satisfy the adaptations of the specification ontology. Morover, it provides the operations that facilitates both adaptation of administrative workflows and propagation of changes.