Next Generation Enterprise Process Management:
Component-oriented Development of Adaptive Process-oriented
Enterprise Software

 

The adequate IT support for enterprises to better support their business processes is a big challenge. Process management systems show a promising way to achieve this goal. If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g. to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e. to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system.

One major project goal of the pre-competitive AristaFlow project and its consortium of universities and industrial partners is to develop concepts for a software environment which supports the component-based development of adaptive, process-aware enterprise applications in a "plug & play" like fashion. For this we will develop an experimental adaptive process management system which will offer a degree of flexibility and adaptability that goes far beyond the capabilities of current workflow systems. This process management system will be based on the ADEPT workflow technology (complemented by additional features). Particularly, the offered functionality will allow developing process-aware information systems orders of magnitudes faster and with much more built-in flexibility than today.

Especially for small and medium-sized companies it is very important that the implementation and usage of process-oriented information systems based on such kind of technology does not become complicated. Therefore all technological alternatives also have to be evaluated under this aspect.

Another and probably the most important project goal is to provide at the end of the project a running experimental process composition and execution environment free of charge which can be used to teach modern concepts for the development and execution of process-oriented information systems and as experimental platform for application development and for the realization of new kinds of enterprise software in industry.

 

Start of project: October 2004

Duration: 3 years

Funding: State of Baden-Württemberg, Germany

 

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