Dimensions of Partial Completion of Activities in Workflow Management

Process and workflow management have become well accepted methods for helping to increase efficiency in companies. However the experience has been that highly structured workflows need to be more flexible to meet the requirements of dynamic businesses today. Recently Lin and Orlowska [2005] have addressed this topic by introducing partially complete-able activities. In contrast to classic workflows the activities do not show an allor-nothing behaviour (they are fully completed or not) but can be completed on different levels. The decision as to whether or not the process can be continued is then the responsibility of the process owner. In our paper we extend this concept by the introduction of fuzzy and probably complete-able activities. Moreover we show that a process memory can further increase the flexibility of the workflow.

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