Advanced Migration Strategies for Adaptive Process Management Systems

Abstract

Enabling dynamic process changes is an essential requirement for any adaptive process management technology. Particularly, it should be possible to migrate (long-)running process instances to a new process schema version. Further, instance migration must not violate soundness; i.e., structural and behavorial consistency of executed process schemas need to be preserved. State compliance has been introduced as basic correctness notion to ensure that instances, whose state has progressed too far, are prohibited from being migrated. However, this also excludes them from future process optimizations, which is often not tolerable in practice. This paper introduces advanced migration strategies for coping with non-compliant instances in the context of process change such that they can benefit from future process type changes on the one hand, but do not run into soundness problems on the other hand. Contrary to existing approaches, the strategies proposed in this paper are based on adjustments at process type and instance level. Altogether, the suggested migration strategies complement treatment of non-compliant process instances.