Digital Symposium Collection 2000

Mining Exception Instances to Facilitate Workflow Exception Handling San-Yih Hwang, Sun-Fa Ho, and Jian Tang   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Session 1B: Workflow Management and Specification Language Abstract The importance of exception handling within the context of workflow management has been widely recognized. While some exceptions are expected at design time and thus can be incorporated into the workflow design via some flexible mechanism, others are totally unexpected. Previous work in handling unexpected workflow exceptions focuses on the run-time support to, for example, allow the rollback of some already completed activities, validate the correctness of dynamic workflow change, and deploy a solution to handle exceptions. Authorized persons are responsible for deriving solutions to handle exceptions. In this paper we propose a novel approach to facilitating users in proposing solutions for resolving a given exception. Specifically, our approach scans through the previous records in handling exceptions, looking for those that are close to the current exception. The ways in which those exceptions were handled serve as useful information in determining how to handle the current one. Several algorithms are proposed and evaluated through both theoretical analysis and synthetic data set. Copyright(C) 2000 ACM