BPM and Exception Handling: Focus on Organizational Resilience

This paper analyzes exception handling in business process management (BPM) with a major focus on resilience, i.e., the capability to maintain operations under a wide spectrum of potential breakdowns. The research highlights the need to support various types of exceptions, including expected, planned, unexpected, and true exceptions. The developed support contemplates the vital human involvement in exception handling. We propose a specialized component supporting exception diagnosis, escalation to several operators, collaboration support, recovery actions, and monitoring the system evolution. The fundamental contribution of this research is the extension of BPM exception-handling capabilities to true exceptions.

[1]  Gustavo Alonso,et al.  Enhancing the fault tolerance of workflow management systems , 2000, IEEE Concurr..

[2]  James R. Taylor,et al.  Why ERPs Disappoint: the Importance of Getting the Organisational Text Right , 2008 .

[3]  James T. Reason,et al.  Managing the risks of organizational accidents , 1997 .

[4]  Pedro Antunes,et al.  A Collaborative Framework for Unexpected Exception Handling , 2005, CRIWG.

[5]  Rebecca E. Grinter.  Workflow Systems: Occasions for Success and Failure , 2000, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[6]  Peter Dadam,et al.  Evaluation of Correctness Criteria for Dynamic Workflow Changes , 2003, Business Process Management.

[7]  K. J. Vicente,et al.  Cognitive Work Analysis: Toward Safe, Productive, and Healthy Computer-Based Work , 1999 .

[8]  Giorgio De Michelis,et al.  A Light Workflow Management System Using Simple Process Models , 2000, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[9]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Understanding computers and cognition - a new foundation for design , 1987 .

[10]  Mathias Weske,et al.  Formal foundation and conceptual design of dynamic adaptations in a workflow management system , 2001, Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[11]  T. Arora,et al.  Next Generation Business Process Management: A Paradigm Shift , 2008, 2008 IEEE Congress on Services - Part I.

[12]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Dynamic, Extensible and Context-Aware Exception Handling for Workflows , 2007, OTM Conferences.

[13]  Lucy Suchman.  Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication , 1987 .

[14]  Amit P. Sheth,et al.  Knowledge sharing, coordinated exception handling, and intelligent problem solving for cross-organizational business processes , 2001 .

[15]  Fabio Casati,et al.  Specification and implementation of exceptions in workflow management systems , 1999, TODS.

[16]  Johann Eder,et al.  The Workflow Activity Model WAMO , 1995, CoopIS.

[17]  Maria E. Orlowska,et al.  On Capturing Exceptions in Workflow Process Models , 2000 .

[18]  Umeshwar Dayal,et al.  A transactional nested process management system , 1996, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Data Engineering.

[19]  Lucy A. Suchman,et al.  Do categories have politics? , 1993, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[20]  Dickson K. W. Chiu,et al.  Web Interface-Driven Cooperative Exception Handling in Adome Workflow Management System , 2001, Inf. Syst..

[21]  MengChu Zhou,et al.  A Survey and Comparison of Petri Net-Based Deadlock Prevention Policies for Flexible Manufacturing Systems , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews).

[22]  Grzegorz Rozenberg,et al.  Dynamic change within workflow systems , 1995, COCS '95.

[23]  Manfred Reichert,et al.  Unleashing the Effectiveness of Process-Oriented Information Systems: Problem Analysis, Critical Success Factors, and Implications , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews).

[24]  Abraham Bernstein,et al.  How can cooperative work tools support dynamic group process? bridging the specificity frontier , 2000, CSCW '00.

[25]  J. Rasmussen,et al.  Mental procedures in real-life tasks: a case study of electronic trouble shooting. , 1974, Ergonomics.

[26]  Niall Hayes,et al.  Work-arounds and Boundary Crossing in a High Tech Optronics Company: The Role of Co-operative Workflow Technologies , 2000, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[27]  Fabio Casati,et al.  Improving Business Process Quality through Exception Understanding, Prediction, and Prevention , 2001, VLDB.

[28]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Beyond workflow management: product-driven case handling , 2001, GROUP.

[29]  Barbara Weber,et al.  An Agile Approach to Workflow Management , 2004, Modellierung.

[30]  Manfred Reichert,et al.  Dealing with forward and backward jumps in workflow management systems , 2003, Software and Systems Modeling.

[31]  Vesa Savolainen,et al.  Basic Concepts of Exception Handling in Office Information Systems , 1999 .

[32]  Mark Klein,et al.  A Knowledge-based Approach to Handling Exceptions in Workflow Systems , 2011, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[33]  Frank Leymann,et al.  Web services and business process management , 2002, IBM Syst. J..

[34]  Mathias Weske,et al.  Case handling: a new paradigm for business process support , 2005, Data Knowl. Eng..

[35]  Florian Daniel,et al.  A Portable Approach to Exception Handling in Workflow Management Systems , 2006, OTM Conferences.

[36]  Stefanie Rinderle-Ma,et al.  Change patterns and change support features - Enhancing flexibility in process-aware information systems , 2008, Data Knowl. Eng..

[37]  Thomas Herrmann,et al.  Vagueness in models of socio-technical systems , 1999, Behav. Inf. Technol..

[38]  Amit P. Sheth,et al.  Transactions in transactional workflows" in advanced transaction models and architectures , 1997 .

[39]  Robert L. Wears,et al.  Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts , 2006, Quality and Safety in Health Care.

[40]  C. Perrow.  Organizational Analysis: A Sociological View , 1970 .

[41]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Inheritance of workflows: an approach to tackling problems related to change , 2002 .

[42]  Johann Eder,et al.  Workflow recovery , 1996, Proceedings First IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems.

[43]  Pedro Antunes,et al.  Exception Handling Through a Workflow , 2004, CoopIS/DOA/ODBASE.

[44]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Worklets: A Service-Oriented Implementation of Dynamic Flexibility in Workflows , 2006, OTM Conferences.

[45]  Kjeld Schmidt.  Of maps and scripts: The status of formal constructs in cooperative work , 1999, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[46]  Pedro Antunes,et al.  The Integration of Workflow Systems and Collaboration Tools , 1998 .

[47]  Erhard Rahm,et al.  AGENTWORK: a workflow system supporting rule-based workflow adaptation , 2004, Data Knowl. Eng..

[48]  Hernâni Mourão,et al.  Supporting Effective Unexpected Exception Handling in Workflow Management Systems Within Organizational Contexts , 2008 .

[49]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  The Sciences of the Artificial , 1970 .

[50]  Terry Winograd,et al.  Designing a new foundation for design , 2006, CACM.

[51]  John Bowers,et al.  Workflow From Within and Without: Technology and Cooperative Work on the Print Industry Shopfloor , 1995, ECSCW.

[52]  Pedro Antunes,et al.  Supporting effective unexpected exceptions handling in workflow management systems , 2007, SAC '07.

[53]  Amit P. Sheth,et al.  Transactions in Transactional Workflows , 1997, Advanced Transaction Models and Architectures.

[54]  Pedro Antunes,et al.  An Emergency Response Model toward Situational Awareness Improvement , 2009 .

[55]  William M. Tepfenhart,et al.  Emergency Response Workflow Resource Requirements Modeling and Analysis , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C (Applications and Reviews).