Reducing Escalation-Related Costs in WFMSs

Escalations refer to the actions taken when workflow activities miss their deadlines. Typically, escalations increase the cost of business processes due to the execution of additional activities, the compensation of finished activities, or the intervention of highly-paid workers. In this paper, we present two techniques for reducing costs related to escalations; namely, dynamic deadline adjustment and preemptive escalation. The former mechanism uses the slack accumulated during process execution to adjust the deadlines of the remaining activities, i.e., delay escalations. The latter mechanism predicts whether a process is going to escalate at some future point, and it decides whether and when to force escalation at an early stage during execution. Preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our techniques.