What is Adaptivity

The ability to continuously revise business practices is limited when referring to traditional approaches in business process management systems. However, it is essential to organizations aiming at reducing their costs and increasing their revenues. In turbulent environments, the requirement for rapid and continuous changes to business processes, result in less control over the executed activities. As a consequence, process designers are limited in producing solid, well-validated workflow models. This chapter, reviews common approaches to exception handling, focusing especially on adaptive exception handling and introduces a mechanism that allows a flexible ad-hoc generated exception handling using backtracking and forward stepping at a process instance level. A dynamic approach in this domain is required, and can bolster the ability of a business process management system to deal with unexpected situations and to resolve, in runtime, scenarios in which such resolution both is called for and does not violate any business process constraints.