A Novel Workflow Management System for Handling Process Adaptation and Compliance

Modern enterprise organisations rely on dynamic processes. Generally these processes cannot be modelled once and executed repeatedly without change. Enterprise processes execution may evolve unpredictably according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. However, no mechanism exists to ensure an updated process does not violate any compliance requirements. This paper presents a novel enterprise system architecture to combine the techniques of adaptive and compliance workflow solutions and adopting the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) standards. The proposed Adaptive and Compliance Workflow Management System (ACWfMS) enables the development of a workflow management tool to create or update a standard and user-defined model. It automatically validates compliance by comparing a user-defined model against a standard model, and in case of violations, visual feedback is presented to the user. In addition, the architecture facilitates process migration to manage instances with modified definition. An example application of a postgraduate research process is discussed.