Dealing with workflow change: identification of issues and solutions

Adaptability has become one of the major research topics in the area of wor kflow management. Today's workflow management systems have problems dealing with both momentary changes and evolutionary changes. As a result, the wor kflow management system is not used to support dynamically changing workflo w processes or the workflow process is supported in a rigid manner, i.e. ch anges are not allowed or handled outside of the workflow management system. In this paper we focus on the potential problems caused by changes. To str ucture these problems we use a partitioning based on five perspectives. Err ors resulting from change limited to one of these perspectives and multiple -perspective errors are distinguished. To clearly identify the potential pr oblems caused by change, we distinguish between transient and incessant err ors, and syntactic and semantic errors. Based on a classification of change and potential errors we point out stepping stones for solving some of the problems.