Using WfMS to Support Unstructured Activities

Abstract

In this chapter the authors propose a solution to handle unexpected exceptions in WfMS. They characterize these events deeply and recognize that some of them require immediate reaction and users can not plan their response in advance. Current approaches that handle unexpected exceptions are categorized by their resilience property and it is identified that supporting unstructured activities becomes critical to react to these events. Their proposed system is able to change its behaviour from supporting structured activities to supporting unstructured activities and back to its original mode. They also describe how the system was implemented and we discuss a concrete scenario where it was tested.