Verification of Change in a Fragmented Event-Based Process Coordination Environment

Abstract

To allow the distribution of control and visibility of cross-organizational process models and to increase availability and performance of the processes, a process model can be fragmented into logically different parts and distributed in the enterprise architecture. Fragmentation algorithms and execution environments which connect the fragmented process model parts together, recreating the original process execution semantics, have been proposed in earlier works. However, a critical challenge that is left open is the ability to independently change the control structure of a process fragment. This is not trivial as changing the control structure of a specific fragment could break the global process execution. The global process overview is also not available anymore because it is fragmented in the enactment environment and many independent control structure changes could have already been done. In this paper we describe an approach based on state reconstruction which enables to check the admissibility of changes made to the control structure of a process fragment in a fragmented event-based process enactment environment.