What right do you have to do that?-infusing adaptive workflow technology with knowledge about the organisational and autority context of a task (original) (raw)
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2008
Increasingly, workflow systems need to operate in dynamic environments where they are expected to ensure that users are supported in performing flexible and creative tasks while maintaining organisational norms. We argue that in order to cope with these demands, the systems must be provided with knowledge about the organisational structure and authority context of tasks. We support this argument by identifying a number of decision points that an adaptive workflow system must support, discussing how these decisions can be supported with technically oriented capability specifications, and describe how this support can be enhanced with the inclusion of knowledge about organisational structure and authority. We outline how such knowledge can be captured, structured, and represented in a workflow system. We then demonstrate the use of such knowledge by describing how the task initiation, task planning, activity scheduling, and agent interaction functions within a workflow system can be e...
1999
Increasingly, workflow systems need to operate in dynamic environments where they are expected to ensure that users are supported in performing flexible and creative tasks while maintaining organisational norms. We argue that in order to cope with these demands, the systems must be provided with knowledge about the organisational structure and authority context of tasks. We support this argument by identifying a number of decision points that an adaptive workflow system must support, discussing how these decisions can be supported with technically oriented capability specifications, and describe how this support can be enhanced with the inclusion of knowledge about organisational structure and authority. We outline how such knowledge can be captured, structured, and represented in a workflow system. We then demonstrate the use of such knowledge by describing how the task initiation, task planning, activity scheduling, and agent interaction functions within a workflow system can be e...
1970
To achieve more widespread application, workflow systems need to be developed to operate in dynamic environments where they are expected to ensure that users are supported in performing flexible and creative tasks while maintaining organisational norms. We argue that in order to cope with these demands, the systems must be provided with knowledge about the organisational structure and authority context of tasks. We support this argument by identifying a number of decision points that an adaptive workflow system must support, discussing how these decisions can be supported with technically oriented capability specifications, and describe how this support can be enhanced with the inclusion of knowledge about organisational structure and authority. We outline how such knowledge can be captured, structured, and represented in a workflow system. We then demonstrate the use of such knowledge by describing how the task initiation, task planning, activity scheduling, and agent interaction functions within a workflow system can be enhanced by it.
Exploiting AI technologies to realise adaptive workflow systems
1999
In this paper we describe how we are exploiting AI technologies to infuse workflow systems with adaptive capabilities. This work is part of an ongoing applied research programme between AIAI and a number of industrial and academic partners. We begin by presenting the requirements of adaptive workflow within a taxonomy consisting of the layers 0f domain, process, agents, organisation, and infrastructure. We then show how each level can be substantially addressed with AI technologies. Specifically, infrastructure adaptation is addressed with multi-agent toolkits, agent adaptation through knowledgebased capability matching, organisational adaptation through authority based capability matching, process adaptation through AI planning and execution architectures, and domain adaptation through rationale capture. We conclude by identifying important challenges for further work as being the improvement of rationale capture and the support for the evolution of the process models that underlie executing processes.
Who does what? Matching agents to tasks in adaptive workflow
2000
The flexibility of current workflow systems needs to be extended to allow them to operate in more dynamic and uncertain environments. Adaptive workflow systems need to be able to provide intelligent support for the planning and enactment of complex processes; supporting their users in performing flexible and creative tasks, while respecting the norms of the organizations within which they are deployed. We discuss how knowledge about the dynamic context of a process may be represented in terms of roles within tasks, and the remits, authorities, and capability requirements associated with such roles. We outline how this knowledge may be used, together with information about the capabilities of available agents, to support the selection of an appropriate set of agents to fill the roles in a given task. An example is given based on an experimentation task within the chemical process industries.
Reflective Agents for Adaptive Workflows
1997
Adaptation to changes in organizational procedures and business rules is a sine qua non for workflow management systems, if they have to be useful to organizations. This paper describes an approach based on workflow agents capable of managing dynamic changes in business policies. The two key aspects of our approach are (i) the agentification of the process engine, in the sense that this is viewed as controlled and executed by autonomous workflow agents capable of reacting and adapting to external changes, and (ii) the fact that these agents are reflective, in the sense that they can observe and thus modify their own behavior. The model is described in the context of an agent-based framework for coordination with reflective capabilities, and is evaluated against a well-known case of dynamic change.
An ontology-driven architecture for flexible workflow execution
WebMedia and LA-Web, 2004. Proceedings, 2004
Workflow management systems usually interpret a workflow definition rigidly. However, there are real life situations where users should be allowed to deviate from the prescribed static workflow definition for various reasons, including lack of information and unavailability of the required resources. To flexibilize workflow execution, this paper proposes mechanisms that allow execution to proceed in the presence of incomplete information, by adopting presuppositions, and in the presence of negative information, by suggesting execution alternatives. This paper also presents an architecture for the workflow system, which is driven by ontologies that capture semantic relationships between workflows, resources and users.
Design of an Integrated Role-Based Access Control Infrastructure for Adaptive Workflow Systems
Journal of Computing and Information Technology, 2003
With increasing numbers of organizations automating their business processes by using workflow systems, security aspects of workflow systems has become a heavily researched area. Also, most workflow processes nowadays need to be adaptive, i.e., constantly changing, to meet changing business conditions. However, little attention has been paid to integrating Security and Adaptive Workflow. In this paper, we investigate this important research topic, with emphasis on Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) in Adaptive Workflow. Based on our earlier work on a 3-tier adaptive workflow architecture, we present the design of a similar 3-tier RBAC infrastructure, and we show that it conceptually mirrors our adaptive workflow architecture. We also describe the mappings between them, and we show how this mapping can be used to manage organizational RBAC constraints when the workflows are being adapted continuously. We illustrate our ideas throughout the paper with a simple yet non-trivial example.
Improving Flexibility of Workflow Management Systems via a Policy-Enhanced Collaborative Framework
Abstract: Workflow Management Systems available to date present limitations concerning the flexibility of the resulting processes, which enlarge the gap between business processes models, humans and their activities. In real-world scenarios, especially when collaboration among human actors takes place, it is often the case that the tasks a process consists of appear in many subtle variants according to the actor who has to carry them out. In this paper we focus on a system which integrates Web platform for collaborative processes, ...