At the Boundary of Workflow and AI

Contents

Many domains of interest to the workflow community are characterized by ever-changing requirements and unpredictable environments. Workflow systems must increase in sophistication to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process management under such dynamic conditions. This paper describes how techniques from the AI community, specifically reactive control, planning, and scheduling, could be leveraged to develop powerful, next-generation adaptive workflow engines that provide many of the these advanced process management capabilities. Although motivated by somewhat different concerns and grounded in different perspectives, there is much overlap between the objectives and requirements of these two communities of workflow management and Artificial Intelligence. Two systems under development by the authors which embrace this synergy are described.