Adaptation and Evolution Frameworks for Service Based Inter-Organizational Workflows

Abstract

This paper describes pattern-based frameworks for adaptation and evolution of service-based workflow process models meeting specific cooperation patterns widely recognized in the B2B area. In the authors' previous works, they focused on restructuring and interconnecting workflows using the SOA paradigm so as to deal with more flexible inter-organizational workflow (IOWF) models. The main issue of this paper is the question of flexibility of IOWF process models where the authors distinguish two main aspects: adaptability and evolutivity affecting different levels of the IOWF process. For that, they define three categories of adptation called functional, behavioral and interactional adaptations and two categories of evolution called functional evolution and organizational evolution; then, they conceptualize some adaptation and evolution patterns which can be applied on the IOWF process models. The authors' adaptation and evolution frameworks are developed according to the MVC pattern and operate on process models specified with BPEL. Thanks to their high modularity, the frameworks are easily extensible and allow the reusing of patterns to implement other ones.