Goal Compliance Assurance For Dynamically Adaptive Workflows

Business processes capture the functional requirements of an organisation. Today’s businesses operate in a very dynamic and complex environment. Thus, the suitability of automation techniques depends on their ability to rapidly and reliably react to change. To react to change rapidly, an adaptation process for business processes is required. This will also satisfy better quality of services, evidenced through performance and availability. The adaptation process includes a need to support self-monitoring of the business processes, detection of a need for a change, decision making on the right change and execution of the change. The adaptation process must be performed in a reliable and automatic manner with minimal user intervention. One of the techniques that enables automatic adaptation is a policy-driven approach, typically E-C-A policies. Policies can change running business processes’ behaviour according to changing requirements by inserting, replacing or deleting functionalities. However, there are no assurances over policies’ behaviour in terms of the satisfaction of the original goal which is the space that this thesis fills. The presented work provides an approach to support assurances in the face of automated adaptation and changing requirements. To that end, we use trace refinement and ontologies for ensuring goal compliance during adaptation. We present a goal-compliance framework which incorporates adaptation process through E-C-A policies and goal-compliance constraints for assurance purposes. The framework evaluation targets its performance according to two categories: (1) complexity of both processes and adaptation and (2) execution time including adaptation and verification. The evaluation results show that the framework reliably guarantees the satisfaction of the process goal with minimal user intervention. Moreover, it shows a promising performance in which it is a very important aspect of runtime environment.