Dealing with change in process choreographies: Design and implementation of propagation algorithms

Abstract

Enabling process changes constitutes a major challenge for any process-aware information system. This not only holds for processes running within a single enterprise, but also for collaborative scenarios involving distributed and autonomous partners. In particular, if one partner adapts its private process, the change might affect the processes of the other partners as well. Accordingly, it might have to be propagated to concerned partners in a transitive way. A fundamental challenge in this context is to find ways of propagating the changes in a decentralized manner. Existing approaches are limited with respect to the change operations considered as well as their dependency on a particular process specification language. This paper presents a generic change propagation approach that is based on the Refined Process Structure Tree, i.e., the approach is independent of a specific process specification language. Further, it considers a comprehensive set of change patterns. For all these change patterns, it is shown that the provided change propagation algorithms preserve consistency and compatibility of the process choreography. Finally, a proof-of-concept prototype of a change propagation framework for process choreographies is presented. Overall, comprehensive change support in process choreographies will foster the implementation and operational support of agile collaborative process scenarios.

A Version-based Approach to Address Flexibility of BPMN Collaborations and Choreographies

“…However, we have found two main contributions dealing with this issue. Firstly (Fdhila et al, 2015) addressed change propagation from a partner process towards the processes of the other partners involved in a collaboration or in a choreography. More precisely, they provide a set of algorithms to deal with changes of process schema by adding, deleting, replacing or updating process fragments, but they do not consider changes that can affect messages (i.e., information) exchanged between process partners.…”

Event-based failure prediction in distributed business processes

“…In particular, it defines the relationship between its tasks and characterizes both its control and data flow. The internal logic as well as the corresponding data is hidden from the other organizations [14]. In contrast, a public process represents the interface with the other organizations and includes public tasks as well as the interaction activities from the perspective of one single organization.…”

Enabling Flexible and Robust Business Process Automation for the Agile Enterprise

“…A process is linked to an organizational structure defining functional roles and organizational relationships. Furthermore, a business process may take place in a specific department but may also cross departmental borders or even involve different organizations [5]. Examples of business processes include insurance claim processing, order handling, personnel recruitment, product engineering, and patient treatment.…”