A methodology for designing and managing context-aware workflows

The increased availability of context information and the widespread adoption of more and moi-e powerful devices creates the opportunity and desire for context-aware appUcations. In this paper we focus on a specific but important type of applications: workflow applications. Just like other applications, workflows too require context-aware capabilities, that is, require the capability of modeling business logic that is sensitive and varies depending on the users' context. In this paper, we propose a methodology for context-sensitive business processes development. We extend existing process modeling languages to allow modelling context sensitive regions (i.e, parts of the business process that may have different behaviours depending on context). We also introduce context change patterns as a mean to identify the contextual situations (and in particular context change situations) that may have an impact on the behaviour of a business process. Finally, we propose a set of transformation rules that allow generating a BPEL-based business process from a context sensitive business process. This allows using existing process engines to support context-sensitive business processes.