Adaptive Process Management: An AI Perspective

Introduction

Many domains of interest to the workflow community are characterized by ever-changing requirements and dynamic environments. Workflow systems must increase in sophistication to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary to support their operational requirements for process management. Within the AI community, work on reactive control has lead to the exploration of techniques for intelligent process management to meet the requirements of adaptivity for dynamic and unpredictable environments. Although motivated by somewhat different concerns and grounded in different perspectives, there is much overlap between the objectives and requirements of these two communities.
In an effort to encourage the exchange of ideas, this paper explores how techniques from intelligent reactive control might be leveraged to provide adaptivity within workflow technologies, while also acknowledging their current limitations for certain workflow requirements. Two systems under development by the authors are described that illustrate how reactive control and other AI techniques can be transitional to provide a basis for adaptive workflow technology.