In order to manage evolving organisational practice and maintain compliance with changes in policies and regulations, businesses must be capable of dynamically reconfiguring their business processes. However, such dynamic reconfiguration is a complex, human-intensive and error prone task. Not only must new business process rules be devised but also, crucially, the transition between the old and new rules must be managed. In this paper we present a fully automated technique based on formal specifications and discrete event controller synthesis to produce correct-by-construction reconfiguration strategies. These strategies satisfy user-specified transition requirements, be they domain independent - such as delayed and immediate change - or domain specific. To achieve this, we provide a discrete-event control theoretic approach to operationalise declarative business process specifications, and show how this can be extended to resolve reconfiguration problems. In this way, given the old and the new business process rules described as Dynamic Condition Response Graphs, and given the transition requirements described with linear temporal logic, the technique produces a control strategy that guides the organisation through a business process reconfiguration ensuring that all transition requirements and process rules are satisfied. The technique outputs a reconfiguration DCR whose traces reproduce the controller’s reconfiguration strategy. We illustrate and validate the approach using realistic cases and examples from the BPM Academic Initiative.

The design of systems that can change their behaviour to account for scenarios that were not foreseen at design time remains an open challenge. In this article, we propose an approach for adaptation of mobile robot missions that is not constrained to a predefined set of mission evolutions. We implement an adaptive software architecture and show how controller synthesis can be used both to guarantee correct transitioning from the old to the new mission goals with runtime architectural reconfiguration to include new software actuators and sensors if necessary. The architecture brings together architectural concepts that are commonplace in robotics such as temporal planning, discrete, hybrid and continuous control layers together with architectural concepts from adaptive systems such as runtime models and runtime synthesis. We validate the architecture flying several missions taken from the robotic literature for different real and simulated UAVs.

Discrete event controllers are at the heart of many software systems that require continuous operation. Changing these controllers at runtime to cope with changes in its execution environment or system requirements change is a challenging open problem. In this paper we address the problem of dynamic update of controllers in reactive systems. We present a general approach to specifying correctness criteria for dynamic update and a technique for automatically computing a controller that handles the transition from the old to the new specification, assuring that the system will reach a state in which such a transition can correctly occur and in which the underlying system architecture can reconfigure. Our solution uses discrete event controller synthesis to automatically build a controller that guarantees both progress towards update and safe update.