Temporal aspects play a crucial role in today's business life. Delivery times, appointments, and statutory deadlines must be met, processing times and durations be monitored, and economic objectives be pursued. Hence, in our fast paced world, where even small delays might cause severe problems, for companies it is crucial to be aware of the temporal properties of their business processes and to control and monitor them. This becomes even more important in the context of long-running business processes like patient treatment or automotive engineering. Unfortunately, contemporary process-aware information systems (PAISs) lack a comprehensive support for temporal aspects, which restricts their applicability in practice significantly.

Fig. 1 shows an example of a process model enriched with a set of temporal constraints.

The major goal of the ATAPIS project is to develop a comprehensive framework for the specification, control and monitoring of time-aware processes in adaptive PAISs. Special attention will be paid to the correct execution of time-aware processes under real world conditions, as well as to their dynamic adaptation. In particular, it must be possible to execute time-aware processes in a PAIS without affecting its robustness or performance.

Although there exists extensive work on how to verify time-aware processes during build-time, existing approaches often exclude issues related to the execution, control and monitoring of time-aware processes at run-time. In particular, existing algorithms and techniques for verifying and executing time-aware processes are limited due to their high complexity. In large scale PAISs, usually hundreds or thousands of process instances are executed concurrently. Hence, it is crucial that the control and monitoring of time-aware processes are handled in an efficient way.

Another fundamental aspect concerns the ability of a PAIS to dynamically adapt running process instances if required, e.g., to handle exceptional situations or to evolve processes to changed circumstances. Especially, this applies to time-aware processes in dynamic environments (e.g. hospitals). For highly dynamic processes, in addition, parts of the process (including respective time constraints) may be even defined completely dynamically during run-time. In summary, it must be possible to apply existing concepts for adaptive PAISs in the context of time-aware processes as well. Finally, users must be enabled to interact with the time component of PAIS. For example, they must be able to assign dates to activities and align them with their personal schedules. Further, users should be notified about delays or predictable problems related to their time-aware processes.