Deviation management during process execution

Software development companies have been putting a lot of effort in adopting process models, however two main issues remain. On the one hand, process models are inherently incomplete, since companies can not capture all possible situations in a single model. On the other hand, managers can not force process participants (agents) to strictly follow these models. The effect of both issues is that companies need to be able to handle deviations during process enactment. In order to make sure that process agents follow the process model and that their deviations get detected and handled, they adopt the so-called Process-centered Software Engineering Environments (PSEEs). Unfortunately, the options proposed by these tools, when it comes to handling a deviation, are rather limited to basically ignoring or forbidding it. In the present work, we face this limitation by presenting an approach for detecting, managing and tolerating agent deviations. Besides, in this paper we present the formal specification for this approach in the Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). It has been used as a the basis of our PSEE prototype.