On-the-Fly Change Propagation for the Co-evolution of Business Processes

Abstract

In large organisations multiple stakeholders may modify the same business process. This paper addresses the problem when stakeholders perform changes on process views which become inconsistent with the business process and other views. Related work addressing this problem is based on execution trace analysis which is performed in a post-analysis phase and can be complex when dealing with large business process models. In this paper we propose a design-based approach that can efficiently check consistency criteria and propagate changes on-the-fly from a process view to its reference process and related process views. The technique is based on consistent specialisation of business processes and supports the data- and control flow perspective. This technique reduces the steps performed in the evolution of business processes by embedding the consistency checks and change propagation into the change enactment phase of the evolution.