Featuring Automatic Adaptivity Through Workflow Enactment and Planning

Process Management Systems (PMSs, a.k.a. Workflow Management Systems - WfMSs) are currently more and more used as a supporting tool to coordinate the enactment of processes. In real world scenarios, the environment may change in unexpected ways so as to prevent a process from being successfully carried out. In order to cope with these anomalous situations, a PMS should automatically adapt the process without completely replacing it. In this paper, the authors propose a general approach and a conceptual architecture to automatic adaptation, based on the concept of declarative modeling of processes and the use of continuous planning techniques.