Supporting behavioral consistency in adaptive case management

Christoph Kaineder
2019 unpublished
Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is part of an ongoing trend in the field of business process management that aims to enable highly flexible process-aware information systems. ACM follows a non-prescriptive paradigm. That is, the business users have the freedom to decide what is to be done in order to achieve a business goal. Consequently, processes in ACM range between semi-structured and completely unstructured, and ad hoc actions can be performed in reaction to unforeseeable events. This high
more » ... egree of flexibility comes along with challenges regarding behavioral consistency. Many knowledge-intensive domains are subject to a vast and ever-growing amount of behavioral constraints stemming from sources such as laws, standards, business contracts, and best practices, to name but a few. To preserve the high flexibility of ACM during case execution, such behavioral constraints must be integrated with great care. In particular, it must be avoided to introduce any kind of rigidness that would pose an obstacle for flexibility during case execution since flexibility is the core feature and a major selling point of ACM. Moreover, during the design of case templates, which can be used as basis for case execution, business administrators are challenged not to introduce errors that would lead to behavioral inconsistencies during case execution. While the state of the art provides numerous approaches for behavioral verification of flow-driven business processes, case modeling is a relatively new paradigm with a lack of sufficient support for behavioral verification. This thesis aims to make formal/technical as well as empirical contributions to support behavioral consistency in ACM. To support business administrators during the creation or amendment of case templates, this thesis proposes an approach for the efficient behavioral verification of case templates based on reduction techniques and model checking. By offering a business-driven approach based on business ontology and high-level behavioral patterns for the creation of [...]
doi:10.25365/thesis.57572 fatcat:kde67u53jrcrjdrdo757buuw5i