Decision making in process-aware information systems involves build-time and run-time decisions. At build-time, idealized process models are designed based on the organization’s objectives, infrastructure, context, constraints, etc. At run-time, this idealized view is often broken. In particular, process models generally assume that planned activities happen within a certain period. When such assumptions are not fulfilled, users must make decisions regarding alternative arrangements to achieve the goal of completing the process within its expected timeframe or to minimize tardiness. We refer to the required decisions as escalations. This paper proposes a framework for escalations that draws on established principles from the workflow management field. The paper identifies and classifies a number of escalation mechanisms such as: changing the routing of work, changing the work distribution, or changing the requirements with respect to available data. A case study and a simulation experiment are used to illustrate and evaluate these mechanisms.

Business processes, such as workflows, are software, too. However, development, evolution, and deployment of business processes have different difficulties from general software. Control, introduction, evaluation, and testing of business processes are difficult because multiple processes are related to each other and many people are involved in processes. To solve these problems, we propose BPT/BPR/BPS (Business Process Tactics, Reengineering, and Simulation) lifecycle, based on multi-agent groupware model. BPT means activities to control processes dynamically, which we have already proposed. In this paper the simulation phase is mainly focused. We give a simulation model which has some original aspects, and show a prototype of simulation tool. Keywords: Business Process, Simulation, Multi-Agent Systems, Human Factor, Agent-Based Groupware, Workflow Systems. 1.

Abstract. Today’s workflow management systems have not sufficiently dealt with time information, which involves time modeling at build-time and time management at run-time. As a consequence, workflow management systems are short of the ability to support the checking of temporal constraints at run-time. Although several approaches have been devised to tackle this problem, they are limited to a single workflow, using static techniques to verify temporal constraints on it. However, in an environment with concurrent workflows, there may well exist resource constraints between these workflows, which affect significantly the verification of temporal constraints at run-time. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for dynamic verification of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows. We investigate resource constraints in workflow management systems and concurrent workflow executions, and then develop the proposed verification method through analysing the temporal relationship and resource constraints between activities from different workflows. 1