Scientific workflow is gaining ever‐increasing attention as it integrates a wide range of heterogeneous services to enable and accelerate the scientific discovery processes. However, the exception occurred in a scientific workflow execution often decreases the robustness of a scientific workflow system. For example, if a service engaged in a scientific workflow schedule becomes unavailable during its execution, an exception might be raised and the whole workflow execution may be interrupted unexpectedly. In this situation, it is a challenge to smooth the interrupted workflow execution. In view of this challenge, an exception handling method, named RelaxingMe (constraints Relaxing Method, RelaxingMe) is proposed in this paper. This method aims at relaxing the original QoS constraint values requested by the interrupted task node, in order to find a near‐to‐optimal candidate service to replace the unavailable one. At last, the feasibility of our method is evaluated by an experiment. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.