Generic Workflow Models: How to Handle Dynamic Change and Capture Management Information?

† Part of this work was done at AIFB (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) and LSDIS (Univeristy of Georgia, USA) during a sabbatical leave. Abstract Traditionally, workflow management systems are used to support static processes, i.e., processes which do not change frequently. This has limited the scope of workflow management. Moreover, the networked economy of the new millennium requires workflow management systems which are able to deal with dynamically changing workflow processes. This paper addresses two notorious problems related to adaptive workflow: (1) providing management information at the right aggregation level, and (2) supporting dynamic change, i.e., migrating cases from an old to a new workflow. These two problems are tackled by using generic process models. A generic process model describes a family of variants of the same workflow process. It is a first step in the direction of truly flexible workflow management systems and provides a handle to solve the two problems mentioned.