Requirements for Dynamic Jumps at the Execution of Business Processes

At process-aware information systems, it is sometimes necessary to deviate from the modelled business process. For instance, in exceptional cases or to correct mistakes, users shall be able to jump dynamically forward and backward in the process. Until now, this topic was hardly respected in scientific literature and it is insufficiently realized in commercial process engines. In this paper, very comprehensive requirements and the expected behavior of a process engine are presented for such dynamic jumps during run-time of a business process. The approach does not only respect forward and backward jumps within sequences of activities but also jumps into and out of parallel branches, conditional branches, and within loops. In addition, configuration options allow to define the desired behavior: For instance, activities bypassed by a forward jump may be caught up later on. As well, it is configurable whether activities that were already executed earlier, shall be repeated after a backward jump or whether their results (output data) shall be reused. Furthermore, it is discussed when and by whom such configuration options may be defined.