Planlets: Automatically Recovering Dynamic Processes in YAWL

Process Management Systems (PMSs) are currently more and more used as a supporting tool to coordinate the enactment of processes. YAWL, one of the best-known PMSs coming from academia, allows to define stable and well-understood processes and provides support for the handling of expected exceptions, which can be anticipated at design time. But in some real world scenarios, the environment may change in unexpected ways so as to prevent a process from being successfully carried out. In order to cope with these anomalous situations, a PMS should automatically recover the process at run-time, by considering the context of the specific case under execution. In this paper, we propose the approach of Planlets, self-contained YAWL specifications with recovery features, based on modeling of pre- and post-conditions of tasks and the use of planning techniques. We show the feasibility of the proposed approach by discussing its deployment on top of YAWL. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.