Making business processes adaptive through semantically enhanced workflow descriptions

The research presented in this paper describes a methodology for making business processes described in BPEL adaptive by using semantically enhanced workflow descriptions. Based on widely used technologies for business process management in service oriented architectures new methods are introduced. They enable flexible process execution and service selection while maintaining the required level of resilience and security in such sensitive settings. An evaluation of the system's performance shows that the overhead introduced by the dynamic service selection is minor, given that the impact of adaptability on the entire process execution is extremely positive.