Cooperative exception handling with hierarchical process models

Up to now, exceptional situations in workflow management have only been handled by using physical relations between work items (e.g. "rejecting and giving back results within a workflow"). The approach presented in this paper uses meta-information from a workflow to support problem-solving by workers within the workflow. Based on the WAM approach that builds up a situation-specific hierarchy of tasks, a method is presented that is also able to cope with the adaptation of already planned as well as already carried out parts of a workflow.