In (Tran et al., 2011), the authors defined pat-
terns for modeling process and a mechanism for ap-
plying patterns to refactoring process models. This
work does not tackle collaborative tasks. (Vo et al.,
2015) proposed also an approach to define and apply
collaboration patterns for software development mod-
eling. Compared to these pattern-based approaches,
our work allows dynamical application of patterns for
adapting the behavior of a running process at execu-
tion time.
5 CONCLUSION
Our current research focuses on the flexible manage-
ment of collaborative processes. Our work targets
the modeling and execution of collaborative tasks.
The work presented in this paper considers in partic-
ular multi-instance tasks which are instantiated sev-
eral times at execution and performed by different ac-
tors but all collaborating to produce a common result.
The objective of this work was providing a solution
to model partially multi-instance tasks and then us-
ing the late-biding mechanism to complete the tasks
behavior flexibly at execution time.
The main contribution of our work is the language
ECPML used to model collaborative process, both
structural and behavioral aspects, at modeling and ex-
ecution time. We have used ECPML to model a set of
collaboration patterns describing the typical behavior
models of multi-instance tasks. These patterns can be
bound to the structural model of a collaborative task
to complete the task information and thus allow man-
aging collaborative tasks. The execution of the col-
laboration is assisted by our prototype process man-
agement system CPE.
To improve the validation of our approach, we
need to apply it to other case studies and especially to
real projects. Indeed, it is always better to work with
real project data, but our objective is mostly to test
the set of collaboration strategies at execution time.
Adding new collaboration patterns is also desirable
but the limited set of collaboration patterns imple-
mented, so far, does not question the validity of our
approach. The proposition of more patterns, which is
one of our perspective, will not put at risk the scala-
bility of our approach since the search function com-
plexity of a suitable pattern is linear.
We aim also supporting more complex collabo-
rative task behaviors. Currently, we only deal with
patterns describing one kind of work-sequence rela-
tions among the single tasks instances of a collab-
orative task (for example Finish2Start). However,
sometimes in practice there are several kinds of inter-
instances relations inside a task. To support more
complex collaborations, we intend to investigate the
proposition of new patterns covering those situations.
We explore also the capacity of combining dynami-
cally collaboration patterns at execution time.
One of our perspective also is to investigate the
possibility of allowing a single task instance inside a
collaborative task instance to become itself a collab-
orative task instance during enactment. Indeed, it is
needed sometimes to allow a task to be refined into
several instances due to constraints (such as emer-
gency for a faster execution).
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