Specifying Flexible Human Behavior in Interaction-Intensive Process Environments

Fast changing business environments characterized by unpredictable variations call for flexible process-aware systems. The BPM community addressed this challenge through various approaches but little focus has been on how to specify (respectively constrain) flexible human involvement: how human process participants may collaborate on a task, how they may obtain a joint decision that drives the process, or how they may communicate out-of-band for clarifying task-vital information. Experience has shown that pure process languages are not necessarily the most appropriate technique for specifying such flexible behavior. Hence selecting appropriate modeling languages and strategies needs thorough investigation. To this end, this paper juxtaposes the capabilities of representative human-centric specification languages hADL and Little-JIL and demonstrate their joint applicability for modeling interaction-intensive processes.