A Hypermedia-Driven Approach for Adapting Processes via Adaptation Processes

Abstract

In addition to an increasing need for business process management systems (BPMS) to dynamically adapt to situational change, there is increased interest in web service accessibility of BPMS to broaden their integration in enterprises and the cloud. Towards this end, a RESTful hypermedia-driven enactment and adaptation of processes has not been adequately explored. This paper thus investigates a hypermedia extension of our process adaptation approach AProPro we call AProProh (Adapting Processes via Processes using hypermedia) that dynamically provides hypermedia to guide process clients in the navigation, enactment, and adaptation of process instances. Clients of process-aware information systems (PAIS) have hitherto been tied to vendor-specific APIs and lacked a standard web-based API. The AProProh HATEOAS-PAIS middleware enables process clients to be more generic and PAIS-agnostic via REST APIs. Additionally, process clients can dynamically apply valid adaptations or adjust to process model changes utilizing dynamically generated hypermedia. Based on a case study prototype realization supporting dynamic invocation of process adaptation patterns, the initial evaluation results show its feasibility and gauge its performance overhead.