Exterminating the dynamic change bug: A concrete approach to support workflow change

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 ad-hoc changes and evolutionary changes. As a result, the workfl ow management system is not used to support dynamically changing workflow p rocesses or the workflow process is supported in a rigid manner i.e., chang es are not allowed or handled outside of the workflow management system, In this paper, we focus on a notorious problem caused by workflow change: the "dynamic change bug" (Ellis et al., Proceedings of the Conference on Organ izational Computing Systems, Milpitas, California, ACM SIGOIS. ACM Press. N ew York, 1995, pp. 10-21). The dynamic change bug refers to errors introduc ed by migrating a case (i.e., a process instance) from the old process defi nition to the new one. A transfer from the old process to the new process c an lead to duplication of work, skipping of tasks, deadlocks, and livelocks . This paper describes an approach for calculating a safe change region. If a case is in such a change region, the transfer is postponed.