Abstract-Business Process Management (BPM) has gained significant adoption in practice for enabling organizations to increase their effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. This broad adoption has not only been fostered by a rich and wellestablished theory to model, analyze, simulate, and enact business processes, but also by internationally accepted standards and mature technologies. Caused by the ever increasing speed and volatility of markets and the dynamics of new technologies, such as cloud infrastructures and mobile communications, we face a new generation of business processes, which we refer to as living inter-organizational processes. Such processes are not in control of one single organization; instead, they are enacted by multiple organizations, where no participating party possesses full control over the entire process. Such processes often involve a high number of actors that might even be unknown in advance. These actors require various degrees in participation, they are acting in heterogeneous environments. Moreover, such processes are often weakly structured or designed in an ad-hoc manner, and have to be continuously subject to evolution. Unfortunately, existing theories, methodologies, and technologies cannot cope with this challenging combination of aspects, which all have to be considered when dealing with living inter-organizational processes. The state of the art typically addresses singular aspects in isolation. However, a holistic approach to these challenges bears a tremendous potential. This paper aims to contribute towards a holistic approach to living inter-organizational processes. To this end, we describe different perspectives on inter-organizational processes and identify challenges for making them living processes.

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Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS), such as workflow systems, support organizations in optimizing their processes by increasing efficiency and structure. In such systems, the inclusion of humans beyond the typical concept of roles has not yet been paid much attention to. However, a tighter integration of human resources can be beneficial for both, employees and employers. Our contribution is the formal integration of experiences into PAIS. This integration a) enables employees to track which experiences they gain while working on process tasks, b) allows employees to express experience development goals, and c) allows employers to, based on the employees' experiences and goals, improve task allocation to employees. We introduce experience breeding, which describes how to measure experience variances that occur when employees work on certain tasks. We present a simulation design, discuss preliminary results and the potential improvements to overall task allocation effectiveness compared to standard algorithms.

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Synchronization of running process instances has been identified as major challenge in literature and practice. Although process instances are, for example, often required to share resources such as printers or centrifuges, the necessary instance synchronization is not supported by most process engines. While existing (scarcely supported) patterns deal with the intraprocess synchronization of activities, a model for a more generic synchronization mechanism is still missing. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. (1) We introduce a generic model to describe the state transitions of process instances at runtime, and based on this model (2) define a subscription based event / voting mechanism that enables arbitrary synchronization within and between running instances. In order to demonstrate the validity of our approach, we will conduct an extensive evaluation against existing synchronization patterns, as well as describe a generic rule engine prototype that implements the presented approach.

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