Supporting Dynamic Workflows with Automatic Extraction of Goals from BPMN

Abstract

Organizations willing to employ workflow technology have to be prepared to undertake a significant investment of time and effort due to the exceptionally dynamic nature of the business environment. Today, it is unlikely that processes are modeled once to be repeatedly executed without any changes. Goal-oriented dynamic workflows are a promising approach to provide flexibility to the execution of business processes. Many goal-oriented frameworks exist in the literature to be used for the purpose. However, modeling goals is a burden for the business analyst. This work proposes an automatic approach for extracting goals from a business process for supporting adaptive workflows. The approach consists of a static analysis of the global workflow state. Goals derive from individual BPMN elements and their interactions. For validating the theory, we developed the BPMN2Goals tool, which has been used for supporting a middleware for self-adaptation.