Dynamic evolution in workflow management systems

The environments where workflow management systems are typically used in are constantly changing. It is nearly impossible to foresee, at business process design stage, all the combinations of tasks needed to achieve the process' goals. Workflow management systems capable of supporting dynamic changes on executing instances in a flexible manner are thereby demanded. Former approaches have proposed a solution to this issue based on workflow type versioning and workflow instance migration. However, the operations that handle the modification of workflow types as well as the migration algorithm for workflow instances are tied to a particular representation of workflow types. This means that whenever the representation changes, the migration algorithms and the modification operations have to change accordingly. This is a current problem due to the uprising of different specifications for workflow definition languages, which are far away from stabilizing. In this paper, we address this problem by clearly decoupling the modification operations of workflow types from the internal structures and algorithms responsible for the instances' migration. In this manner we enable the use of different workflow definition languages while keeping the same internal structures and migration algorithms.