Introducing Agile Controllability in Temporal Business Processes

Dynamic controllability is currently regarded as the most adequate notion for checking the temporal correctness of business processes with temporal constraints when a process model includes uncontrollable activities whose duration is revealed at the time of activity completion. However, dynamic controllability cannot take advantage when an actual duration is revealed earlier, leading to unnecessary strict checks for temporal correctness. We propose a novel notion of agile controllability, which takes into account that uncontrollable durations are revealed earlier and that in a viable execution strategy, a time point may depend on time points whose value is known earlier. We formalize the notion of agile controllability and present an effective checking procedure evaluated by a software implementation within a publicly available modeling and checking software tool.